The World In 2030

THE WORLD IN 2030

THE WORLD in 2030 a,d

BY THE RIGHT HONOURABLE

THE EARL OF BIRKENHEAD,

P.C., G.C.S.I., D.C.L., LL.D,, D.Litt.

HIGH STEWARD OF OXFORD UNIVERSITY, LORD
RECTOR OF ABERDEEN UNIVERSITY, WITH
ILLUSTRATIONS BY E. McKNIGHT KAUFFER

HODDER AND STOUGHTON

LIMITED LONDON

ST. PAUL'S HOUSE
WARWICK 3IJUARI

E.C.

4

PrtiUed «i Great Untam far Iloddcr cS- Sfowg/^fan,
by C, Ttniir^ S Co., Liverpool, London ana Pfewi.

To

My Daughter
Pamela

WITH HER Father’s love

PREFACE

It is the purpose of the Essays which follow
to attempt a series of speculative predictions
dealing with the possible development of the
world during the next hundred years.

If one looks back a hundred years and so
looking compares the world of that day with
the world of to-day, one becomes almost equally
conscious of the equal risk of under-estimating
and of over-estimating the developments which
lie in front of us.

That man only is wise who does not dog-
matise and who proclaims nothing impossible.

It may, for instance, be imagined that if the
Duke of Wellington had been informed that
within one hundred years an American boy,
flying alone, in a machine heavier than air,
would cross the vast and stormy Atlantic
on a non-stop flight. His Grace would
have found it necessary to draw upon a

vii

PREFACE

deservedly appraised resource in expletive.

In another sphere, it would, I imagine, have
caused little less surprise if it had been announced
that in the same space of one hundred years a
female member of the House of Commons would
become a Cabinet Minister ; that female Doctors
of Medicine and Barristers would be common ;
that the Speakership of the House of Commons,
and perhaps even the Woolsack, were open to
feminine assault, even if extremely unlikely to
succumb thereto ; that the last unstormcd
citadel would be that of incumbency in the
Church of England; that even this was menaced;
so that theoretically, at least, we might one
day be indulged by the spectacle of a female
sitting on the throne of Thomas k Bccket.

Remembering these and a thousand other
changes, mechanical, ethical, social, political and
constitutional, we shall, it may be repeated,
be wise to declare little impossible in the
hundred years in which our sons and grandsons
will live.

The effort to predict an unknowable future
must always possess a fascination of its own.

viii

PREFACE

In the slight essays which are collected in this
volume I follow — longum post intervallum — in
the footsteps of Jules Verne, Bellamy, Wells
and Haldane.

I am very conscious that each of these
distinguished men possessed, or possesses,
qualifications which I cannot claim. An inferior
scientific equipment disables me from discussing
with any real weight that aspect of our develop-
ment which will assuredly be the most fruitful.
And the only two branches of human knowledge
upon which I can perhaps claim to write with
some authority, namely, those of Law and
Politics, are unfortunately, from this point of
view, just the two that are least likely to
sustain profound modification.

For these reasons, I put these Essays forward
without undue assurance. That many of the
changes herein predicted will be realised is
certain. Others, no doubt, will hardly escape
the smile which is given to phantasy.

But, however this may be, and with what-
ever reputation as a prophet I emerge from the ,
publication of these Essays, one thing may

ix

PREFACE

certainly be predicted — that I am unlikely to
witness either the vindication or the confusion
of my vaticinatory efforts. And it is almost
equally improbable that anyone, however young,
who reads this book on its publication, will
live to be old enough either to acclaim or to
deride its conclusions.

BIRKENHEAD.

Charlton, March, 1930.

CONTENTS

PAGE

THE WORLD IN 2O3O . , . . I

WAR IN 2030 24

INDUSTRY IN 2030 .... 49

EVERYDAY LIFE IN 2030 ... 7^

THE AMENITIES OF 203O . . . 100

THE AIR ra 2050 .....

THE WORLD POLITY IN 203O . , . I38

WOMAN IN 2030 164

THE FUTURE IN 2030 .... 187

xi

THE WORLD IN 203O

f i ''HE results of scientific research control the

A wealth of nations and the beliefs of their
peoples. For it is not only in the material
world that science is important ; ideas and
ethics no less than machines develop as the
direct outcome of the discoveries of scientific
workers. Without Newton, for example, the
scepticism and rationalism of the eighteenth
century would have been impossible. The
elaboration of Darwin’s hypothesis as to the
development of hfe on the earth gave a new
and startling direction to the whole course of
philosophy and theology. In the last decade
Einstein has put forward views about the nature
of space which will almost certainly revolu-
tionise our whole conception of the Universe.

A century hence it appears probable that the
application of scientific discoveries will have
altered the conditions of human life at least as

THE WORLD IN 203O

much as they have done in the past hundred years.
A child born in 1830 arrived in a world which was
just beginning to exploit the steam engine,
in which electricity was the useless toy of a few
professors, where anaesthetics and antiseptics
were unknown. The child of 2030, looking back
on 1930, will consider it as primitive and quaint,
as the conditions of 1830 seem to the children
of the present day. Our means of travel, our
sources of wealth, our medicine and even our
ideas will change as drastically during the next
century as they did in the course of the last.

Applied physics, which have given us the
steam-engine, the internal combustion motor,
as well as wireless, telephones, and all the
many other practical uses of electrical energy,
win certainly make prodigious advances before
the year 2030. At the moment, however, the
theoretical basis of physics rests in an un-
determined state. Physics is on the brink
of a new synthesis, a fresh simplification and
restatement of fundamental ideas. This, when
it comes — and it cannot long be delayed —
must radically change all our assumptions

THE WORLD IN 203O

concerning time, space, and the nature of
change.

Such a revolution of ideas must be accounted
among the most important reactions of science
upon human life in the next century ; but it
is, of course, very difficult to predict what
direction this change of ideas will take. Until
another Newton restates physical theory, one
cannot determine how his restatement wiU
react upon the everyday world.

It is easier to prophesy concerning the
material changes which wiU be wrought by
applied physics in the next hundred years.
The best scientific opinion believes that before
2030 physicists wiU have solved the problem
of supplying the world with limitless amoimts
of cheap power. At present we derive the
energy which drives the wheels of industry
from coal and oil. Both these substances
are won from nature at the expense of much
money and vast stores of muscular energy,
nor are their supplies inexhaustible. By
means of the most efficient methods, more-
over, a pound of coal can only be made to

3

THE WORLD IN 203O

yield energy of the order of one horse-power
for one hour. Yet, locked up in the atoms
which constitute a pound of water, there is an
amount of energy equivalent to ten million
horse-power-hours. It is undoubted that this
colossal source of energy exists ; but as yet
physicists do not know how to release it ;
or, having done so, how to make it perform
useful work.

This problem will be solved before 2030.
Some investigator, at present in his cradle or
unborn, will discover the match with which
to light this bonfire, or the detonator needful
to cause this terrific explosion.

The consequences of tapping such stupendous
sources of cheap energy are almost illimitable.
For the first time in his history, man will be
armed with sufficient power to undertake opera-
tions on a cosmic scale. It wiU be open to
him radically to alter the geography or the
climate of the world. By utilising some 50,000
tons of water, the amount displaced by a large
finer, it would be possible to remove Ireland
to the deeper portion of the Atlantic Ocean.

4

THE WORLD IN 203O

The heat obtainable from the same quantity
of water would suffice to maintain the polar
regions at the temperature of the Sahara for a
thousand years.

The liberation of this energy will naturally
revolutionise travel and transport. Engines
weighing one ounce for each horse-power they
develop wiU become practical possibilities ; and
a power plant of six hundred horse-power will
carry fuel for a thousand hours’ working, in
a tank no bigger than a fountain-pen. Con-
cerning the nature of the vehicles for which
such engines will prowde the motive power,
it is rash to prophesy. Passengers will travel
in enormously swift aeroplanes, which by 2030
will ascend and descend vertically. Goods
will be carried cheaply and rapidly by land or
sea, propelled by motors whose fuel bill will be
neghgible.

The coming of this new energy will obviously
be accompanied by acute social problems. Its
adaptation to industry wiU entail, for example,
the final extinction of coal-mining. Since, how-
ever, it cannot but vastly reduce the cost of aU

5

THE WORLD IN 2O3O

manufactures, there is hope that the new wealth
it creates will enable governments adequately
to provide for the millons whose livelihood it
destroys.

Some authoritative scientists do not believe
that the solution of the power problem will
be reached along these lines. They consider
that either the winds or the tides will be forced
to yield up their energy. Water power is too
unevenly distributed over the earth’s surface,
and too affected by seasonal variations, ever to
become the principal source of the world’s
energy; but the winds are never still, and the
tides flow and ebb with unvarying precision.

If the winds were harnessed they could
produce a superabundance of cheap power.
During stormy weather their surplus energy
could be stored in a variety of ways and so be
available during calms.

The exploitation of tidal energy presents
difiiculties which have yet to be solved in a
satisfactory manner. These difficulties, how-
ever, are not those of principle but of technique ;
and, if the wealth and the serious engineering

6

THE WORLD IN 2030

attention of the world were focused on the
question for ten years, there is no doubt that
they would be overcome. The tides of the
Bay of Fundy alone could supply the whole of
North America with electrical energy.

By utihsing tidal energy to any large extent,
we should diminish the speed of the earth’s
rotation. As it is, the tides act as a brake
upon the rotation of the earth. Tidal friction
occurs principally in the Bering Sea, which
divides Alaska from Siberia. Its present effect
is negligible, since it only lengthens the day
by a fraction less than a second in the course of
each century.

If sufficient energy were extracted from the
tides to supply every imaginable future develop-
ment of human enterprise with power, this
braking effect would not be greatly increased.
Many millions of years would elapse before the
day grew as long as our present week. Seven
thousand years take us back to the dawn of
recorded human history; so that even a tenth
part of one million years carries us forward
beyond the reach of imagination. We need

7

THE WORLD IN 203O

not, therefore, grow alarmed that by harness-
ing the tides we shall so retard the rotation
of the earth as to embarrass our remotest
descendants. But the forty-eight-hour day is
a possibility in the far future.

During the next hundred years, applied
physics will certainly develop wireless telephony
and television beyond our present most imagina-
tive expectations. By 2030 it should be
possible for any person sitting at home to be
'' present ” at no matter what distant event.
Stereoscopic television in Ml natural colours,
and perfected wireless telephony will enable him
to see and hear any event, which is broadcast,
as effectively as if he stood beside the trans-
mitting apparatus. The exiled American will
never need to miss a baseball match ; the
M.C.C. selection committee, in conclave at
Lord’s, will be able to follow the fortunes of an
English eleven through the days (or weeks) of
an Australian test-match ; absence wiU no longer
make lovers’ hearts grow fonder, for they need
never be remote.

Such developments must influence the future

8

THE WORLD IN 203O

of politics ; for by their aid it will be feasible
once more to revive that form of democracy
which flourished in the city states of Ancient
Greece. By 2030 the chosen spokesmen of
each political party will be able to address
every voter as effectively as he can now
address Parliament. And so the electorate
itself, rather than its representatives, may
decide each vital political issue. After the
spokesman of each party has had his (or her)
say, the votes of the entire country could be
recorded and counted by mechanism installed
in the telephone exchanges. Within twenty
minutes from the end of the last speech, the
will of a national jury on any subject could
be ascertained and announced.

Applied chemistry has not affected human
life in a manner comparable with the changes
produced by physical research. So far as the
ordinary man is concerned, chemistry is only
useful to him when it discovers new and
desirable substances ; or discovers a means of
synthesising a material more cheaply than it
is produced by Nature. In the past, chemists
c 9

THE WORLD IN 2030

have enriched the resources of humanity with
new metals, dyes, drugs, explosives, and other
substances useful in industry or in private life.
By 2030, thousands more such new substances
will he available ; aluminium will be cheaper
than pig-iron is to-day ; malleable, unbreakable
glass will be a commonplace of domestic life.

It has also been suggested that chemical
research will turn to the discovery of new
physiologically pleasant substances. At present
civilised mankind has discovered and adopted
only three such substances : tobacco, alcohol,
and caffeine (tea and coffee). These certainly
have added enormously to the amenities of
existence ; and Dr. J. B. S. Haldane, the most
brilliant and far-sighted of contemporary
scientific philosophers, has proposed that chemists
should seriously consider a search for more such
additions to human enjoyment.

Most chemical substances are either disagree-
able or dangerous in their physiological effects,
though a small number (not more than a few
thousands) are valuable to medicine. Should
chemistry in the next hundred years be able

10

THE WORLD IN 2030

to discover a dozen substances as pleasant and
harmless as tobacco, yet each possessing a
different effect on the consumer, it will have
earned the thanks of every hard-worked man
and woman in the world.

Any developments in physics and chemistry,
which can be reasonably predicted to occur
before 2030, can do no more than alter the
accidentals of human existence. In biology,
however, developments may be predicted which
will change the whole nature of life as we
experience it to-day.

Even those who know least about them
confidently expect prodigious advances from
medicine and surgery in the near future, and
their faith will not be vain. The abohtion of
epidemic disease by 2030 is fairly certain, as is
the discovery of cures for such scourges as
cancer and tuberculosis. Complete and pro-
longed local anaesthesia will become practicable ;
so that not only will operations be painless,
but the patient will feel no pain afterwards as
a result of them. Such an advance also
entails completely painless childbirth.

II

THE WORLD IN 203O

Biologists by 2030 will have learned the secrets
of the living chemistry of the human body — or
at least enough to achieve startling results.
Rejuvenation wiU be an ordinary and weU
recognised matter of a few injections at appro-
priate intervals. The desire to keep old age at
bay has ever been one of the dreams of humanity;
at last we can predict that it will be achieved.
" This mortal must put on immortality ” by
extending the length of his days on earth.

The attraction of such an idea, especially to
women, who wiU no longer grow old quickly,
is too clear to require emphasis. But the
universal practice of rejuvenation will be
accompanied by grave social problems, the least
of which would be the immense increase in
population. Suppose it possible to guarantee
150 years of hfe to every healthy child, how will
youths of twenty be able to compete in the
professions or in business against vigorous men,
still in their prime at 120, with a century of
experience on which to draw ? The benefits
to humanity which wiU accrue if the lives of
men of genius are so prolonged is obvious. It

12

THE WORLD IN 2030

is impossible to predict the advantage science
would reap if a rejuvenated Oliver Lodge,
Ernest Rutherford and J. J. Thompson could
be given a further seventy or eighty years
of active life.

Before 2030 biologists will have solved some
of the mysteries of human heredity. Heredity
is determined by certain “ genes ” or units,
concerning which science already knows much.
They are minute bodies, so small that, if a
hen’s egg were magnified to the size of the
world, one of the genes in it would lie on a
fair-sized writing-desk. When biologists can
control these microscopic genes, they will be able
to control heredity. Most probably by 2030
a clever young man will consider his fiancee’s
hereditary complexion before proposing marriage;
and the young woman of that day will refuse
him, because he has inherited a gene from his
father which will predispose their children to
quarrelsomeness. By intelligent combinations of
of suitable genes, it will be possible to predict
with reasonable certainty that truly outstanding
children shall be bom of a marriage.

THE WORLD IN 203O

This is the kind of eugenics which will
develop in the future, rather than the absurdi-
ties of the human stud-farm which so many
earnest, and generally unmarried, enthusiasts at
present predict.

It is possible, however, that by 2030 the whole
question of human heredity and eugenics wiU
he swallowed up by the prospect of ectogenetic
birth. By this is meant the development of
a child from a fertiUsed cell outside its mother’s
body — ^in a glass vessel filled with serum on a
laboratory bench. Such a proceeding is neither
incredible nor, indeed, impossibly remote. The
results of much research show that the con-
nection between a mother and her growing child
is purely chemical ; there is no valid reason
why one day biologists should not be able
perfectly to imitate that chemical connection
in the laboratory.

The possibility of ectogenetic children will
naturally arouse the fiercest antagonism. Re-
ligious bodies of many different creeds will
rally their adherents to fight such a funda-
mental biological invention. In fact the mere

14

THE WORLD IN 203O

mention of its possibility here may strike
many readers as gratuitously affronting.
Nevertheless the thing is possible ; and since
it is possible, it is certain that scientists will
be deterred by no persecution from straining
after attainment.

Should ectogenesis ever become an estabhshed
part of human society, its effect will be shatter-
ing. Primarily it will separate reproduction
from marriage, and the latter institution
wiU become wholly changed. Further, the
character of the future inhabitants of any state
might easily be determined by the government
which happened temporarily to enjoy power.
By regulating the choice of the ectogenetic
parents of the next generation, the Cabinet of
the future could breed a nation of industrious
dullards, or leaven the population with fifty
thousand irresponsible, if gifted, mural painters.

A further immediate consequence of ecto-
genesis would be a plea that society should be
allowed to produce the human tjqies it most
needs, instead of being forced to absorb all
the unsuitable types which happen to be born.

15

THE WORLD IN 203O

If it were possible to breed a race of
strong healthy creatures, swift and ductile
in intricate drudgery, yet lacking ambition,
what ruling class would resist the temptation ?

Many of the arguments brought against slavery
would be powerless in such a case ; for the ecto-
genetic slave of the future would not feel his
bonds. Every impulse which makes slavery
degrading and irksome to ordinary humanity
would be removed from his mental equipment.
His only happiness would be in his task ; he
would be the exact human counterpart of the
worker bee. Only the arguments of religion
could be used to prevent his evolution. His
emancipation could never be considered, for
in freedom he would find only weariness
and misery.

It seems improbable, however, that the
future developments of industry wiU caU for
such a being to tend its wheels. Production
will become so cheap, and, barring political
or international upheavals, wealth will accu-
mulate to such an extent, that the ectogenetic
Robot will never be needed. It is far more

16

THE WORLD IN 203O

likely that men will work as machine-minders
for one or two hours a day and be free to devote
the rest of their energies to whatever form of
activity they enjoy.

Such a condition obviously presupposes that
all drudgery, not only the drudgery of the coal
mine and the machine-shop, will be abolished
by science. It predicates the end of agriculture
as the fundamental industry upon which human
life rests. Probably biology, in alliance with
chemistry, will make an end of agriculture
even sooner than the cheapening of production
will render a ten-hour maximum week universal
in the workshops of the world.

By 2030 agriculture, if not abolished, wUl be
in decay — at least in civilised lands. The
first step towards the end of agriculture will be
the production of benevolent bacteria able to
" fix ” the atmospheric nitrogen which is
essential to the growth of plant hfe. Such
bacilli could never develop naturally, since many
of their ancestors will be unable to live except
under entirely artificial conditions in a labora-
tory. But when the active " nitrogen-fixing ”

THE WORLD IN 203O

bacteria are at last hardened off and allowed to
multiply in agricultural land, their immediate
effect win be to act as a super-efficient manure.

By their aid five or even ten ears of wheat
win grow where one grows now ; while the
pasture which now feeds ten beasts will feed
fifty.

Such a development will, of course, be watched
with anxious eyes by all governments. Food
prices will slump ; millions of labourers all over
the world will find a vanished livelihood.

Hard on the heels of this development will
come the perfection of synthetic food-stuffs.
At present we nourish ourselves by a curiously
wasteful and round-about method. Solar energy
is absorbed by plants and stored by them in
their structures, mainly in the form of cellulose.
The human body is unable to digest cellulose,
and so to extract nourishment from it. Many
animals, however, aided by obliging bacteria,
are able to perform this feat ; and we ' keep
herds of sheep, cattle and pigs, aU engaged in
the task of digesting cellulose and transforming
it into the meat and milk upon which we live.

THE WORLD IN 203O

Already it is possible to convert indigestible
cellulose into digestible sugar, but as yet the
cost of operation prevents its performance
except as a laboratory experiment. Such
processes as this wiU certainly be further
investigated and developed, so that by 2030
starch and sugar (two of our most valuable
foods) wiU be as cheap as sand or salt
to-day.

Concerning proteins, the other most impor-
tant human foods, two possibilities exist. Either
they too will be produced synthetically ; or
else the more highly prized varieties of animal
foods — such, for example, as beefsteak or
chicken's breast — ^wiU be grown in suitable media
in the laboratory. It wdU no longer be necessary
to go to the extravagant length of rearing a
bullock in order to eat its steak. From one
” parent " steak of choice tenderness, it wiU
be possible to grow as large and as juicy a steak
as can be desired. So long as the " parent ”
is supplied with the correct chemical nourish-
ment, it will continue to grow indefinitely and,
perhaps, eternally. Whenever it is sufficiently

19

THE WORLD IN 2030

large, a few pounds (or hundredweights) can be
cut from it and sent to market.

Synthetic foods and the production of animal
tissues in vitro will finally set at rest those
timid minds which prophesy a day when the
earth’s resources will not feed her children.
Though all the inhabitable surface of the glove
were inconveniently crowded, the millions of
mankind could still be fed to repletion by such
means.

This second revolution in food production will
consummate the decay of agriculture, which can
only survive as a rich man’s hobby. A man
born in the twenty-first century may, in his
wealthy rejuvenation, boast that the bread he
eats is made from wheat which grows in his
own fields. Ploughing may even become a
fashionable accomplishment, and pig-keeping a
charming old-world fancy. Probably, however,
the synthetic foods of the next century will be
so much more easily digested and appetising
than their present equivalents, that agriculture
will survive only in historical romances.

Since the beginnings of history the city has

20

THE WORLD IN 203O

been the parasite of the countryside. In 2030
science wUl make the city a self-supporting
unit, and Britain a land of laboratories capable of
feeding no matter how many miUions of mouths
without importing a ton of foodstuffs. Many
will bewail such a prospect, for they insist that
a fiourisliing agricultural peasantry is the only
sound basis of any political life. It will be
necessary when agriculture goes into irrevocable
decay, to plan the evolutions of a stable
industrial society. Such an undertaking should
not lie beyond human wit. The agricultural
basis of society, which has existed for so many
centuries, was itself evolved from nomads
and savages. To reconcile such folk with the
peaceful static life of the husbandman needed
a far more violent adjustment than will be
necessary to urbanise the descendants of the
world’s present agriculturists.

It is conceivable that not aU these changes
will have occurred by 2030. The progress of
scientific discovery is chequered, and subject to
no ascertainable regularity or period. In many
instances an apphed science after a few years

21

THE WORLD IN 203O

of violent progress stagnates, or, at best, is
advanced by small refinements and simplifica-
tions. The history of the locomotive steam
engine provides an illustration. During the last
half-century railway trains have grown steadily
longer and heavier. In consequence larger and
more powerful engines have been evolved to
draw them to their destinations. But the huge
locomotive of to-day differs only in size and
power from its parent of the i86o’s and 1870’s.
No new principle of any importance has been
introduced into its design or construction. A
similar stagnation may overtake the development
of airplanes or of wireless telephony. Such
halts in the progress of any applied science,
however, are comparative and not final. A
fresh mind produces a new idea or a simplification
which inaugurates another period of rapid and
sweeping activity.

I have assumed, therefore, that the rate
of progress in applied physics, chemistry and
biology during the next hundred years will be
maintained approximately at its present level.
It may even be greatly accelerated by the ever

22

THE WORLD IN 203O

increasing interest in scientific research on the
part of industrialists and governments.

Nevertheless, unless science is able to change
our ideas no less rapidly than our environment,
some of the developments at which I have
hinted may not come to pass. Unless, for
example, the ideas of Asiatic peoples are
drastically changed, it will be impossible to
stamp out epidemic disease from the world.

But it is not self-evident that all applications
of scientific discovery deserve the support of
intelligent men and women. Because science
has benefited humanity in the past, there is no
reason why it should always do so in the future.
A biologicsd discovery may well plunge the
world into such a catastrophe as would destroy
civilisation for a thousand years. As you
are reading these words, some disinterested
researcher may detonate an atomic explosion
which wiU involve the world, and reduce it
to a flaring vortex of incandescent gas.

23

WAR IR 2030

T he nature of war follows the nature of
peace. Whoever would predict the course
of a war waged a hundred years hence, must
first imagine the conditions of peace which this
war would terminate. The duration, magni-
tude and ferocity of the last European war were
all predetermined by the national rivalries,
arbitrary frontiers and personal ambitions
which complicated European affairs during
the opening years of the present century.

The. popular belief appears to be that, should
such a calamity as another war between first-
class powers ever occur, it will be more ruthless,
more terrible and more destructive than any
conflict of the past. Imaginative writers seek
to terrify us with descriptions of aerial battles,
as a result of which all London will be laid
waste in a few hours. They tell us that there
will be no distinction drawn between combatant

WAR IN 2030.

WAR IN 2030

and civilian ; that it will be the object of
each warring power to destroy the women
and children of the enemy in addition to his
armaments.

I believe such violent prophecies to be on the
whole unwarranted. Should another war over-
take civilisation a century hence, it will not
improbably be more rather than less humane
than its predecessors.

We are often reminded that the applications
of scientific discoveries to warfare have made
battles more horrible. The carnage wrought by
high explosive projectiles, by aerial bombard-
ment and by machine-guns, is still vivid in the
memories of most men. Science has certainly
increased enormously the destructive power of
the soldier ; but it is too often forgotten that
science has also correspondingly increased his
comfort and safety. Whatever horrors marked
the last war, it was in many respects humane
compared with the campaigns of Napoleon or
Marlborough. Tetanus, gangrene, enteric fever
and cholera have practically vanished from the
combatant armies of the world. Ansesthetics,
B 25

THE WORLD IN 203O

antiseptics and drugs have reduced the terrors
of military hospitals a hundredfold. The armies
which fought over Europe from 1914 to 1918
were spared sufferings and privations which
formerly were the commonplaces of warfare.
They were better fed and cared for when whole,
and more successfully healed when broken, than
any soldiers before them.

In the future the applications of science will
further ameliorate the hardships of the com-
batant soldier. It is strange, however, that
the activities of the League of Nations have
temporarily prevented any advance being made
in that application of science which most
promised an increased humanity in warfare.
I refer, of course, to the League’s prohibition of
the use of gases as weapons. It is certain that
in the near future chemists could have produced
a gas capable of causing prolonged insensibility
with no harmful after-effects. The introduction
of such gases (or clouds of vesicant particles)
would obviously revolutionise warfare. It might
conceivably make battles, as we understand them,
impossible. Yet it has seemed good to the

26

WAR IN 2030

League of Nations to dam future progress along
this most hopeful channel of development. I
cannot believe that this prohibition will remain
long in force ; it will be either removed or
ignored.

There is a second and far more important
reason why future warfare will not increase in
savagery. The civilised world is rapidly be-
coming a single economic unit. With the partial
exception of the United States of America,
no first-class power is any longer economically
independent. Indeed, it may be said that the
disaster of one nation involves all nations. We
have discovered in the last decade that it is
almost as disastrous economically to win a war
as to lose one.

For these reasons no nation in the future
will be able to afford the destruction of an
enemy’s industrial area. Suppose that in 2030
Britain is at war with a Continental power,
and that the latter is capable of destroying
London and the industrial regions of the Mid-
lands, Lancashire and Yorkshire, by means of
aerial bombardment. I do not believe that

27

THE WORLD IN 203O

such a bombardment would ever be carried out ;
because, if it were, the economic fabric not only
of Britain but also of her enemy would crash in
ruins. Admittedly arguments such as these were
advanced before 1914 with the aim of demon-
strating that no general European war could
ever again ’ occur. It was then said that war
was uneconomic, that no great nation could
afford to go to war, that the financiers of the
world would maintain the peace of the world
in their own selfish interests. Events proved
these arguments fallacious ; but the course of
history since 1918 has . shown that warfare and
national bankruptcy have increasingly assumed
the relationship of cause and effect.

It therefore appears improbable that the air
arm wiU become the deciding factor in future
warfare. At present this arm can destroy but
it cannot occupy. An aerial bombardment may
cripple the resources of the enemy, wreck his
communications and disorganise his whole civic
economy, but it cannot invest his territory for
more than a limited number of hours at a
stretch. So long as aerial navigation depends on

28

WAR IN 2030

petrol motors for power, its usefulness will
remain restricted by the force of gravity. An
aerial armada cannot supply itself from the
air. It can only terrorise or destroy. It
can never carry out permanent military
operations.

Possibly within the next hundred years mili-
tary airplanes, propelled by some form of atomic
energy, wiU become common. Such machines
wiU be able to remain in the air for an indefinite
period, so long as they are provided with food
for their occupants. A fleet of these airplanes
might blockade a frontier or overawe a capital
as effectively as a fleet of warships, but it is
difficult to imagine them ever efficiently fulfill-
ing the functions of an army of occupation.

I consider that the land arm, co-operating
closely with the air, will remain the decisive
factor in future warfare, and that wars of occu-
pation rather than of destruction will occupy
the generals of the twenty-first century. Their
object will be to disarm rather than to kfll, in
order that hostile territory may be overrun at
the minimum loss and cost to both combatants,

29

THE WORLD IN 203O

and held until the loser consents to political
argument. Fundamentally this is the objective
of all warfare ; and in the future it will be
attained by more direct and less sanguinary
means than hitherto.

It is possible to be more precise about the
armies of the future than about the warfare
in which they will engage. The last war
saw the reductio ad ahsurdum of a military
development which had been proceeding since
the introduction of firearms. The power of the
bullet determined the strategy and tactics of all
operations on land between 1914 and 1918.
But the bullet wiU not remain the deciding
factor in another war. The armies of the world
are on the brink of a startling transformation.

Napoleon won his victories by manoeuvring
troops armed wdth weapons whose effective
range was one hundred yards. The day was
still decided at the bayonet’s thrust ; an assault
was the logical conclusion of every engage-
ment. Infantry, cavalry and artillery all fought
together under the eye of the commander-
in-chief. Infantry, disposed in squares, could

30

WAR IN 2030

withstand the onslaught of the finest cavalry
and even the prolonged bombardment of
artillery.

Throughout the nineteenth century the lethal
range and precision of the soldiers’ weapons
increased. The flint-lock musket gave way to
the percussion-cap musket. Then came the first
military rifles, and these evolved into the
breech - loading magazine rifles with which
modern armies are provided. As the power
and accuracy of the soldiers’ firearms increased,
the whole nature of warfare changed. The
British square at Waterloo became the almost
unmanageably extended skirmishing line of the
South African War. The artillery, once the
infantry’s closest companion, was forced out of
the range of rifle fire and learned the mysteries
of indirect gun -laying to prevent itself being
excluded altogether from the battlefield. The
commander - in - chief was literally shot off the
scene of his troops’ action, and compelled to
content himself with directing operations in
safety — and in the rear. Generals found
themselves no longer able personally to intervene

31

THE WORLD IN 2030

in battles. They were limited to preparing a
plan which their subordinates put into execution.

So powerful had the bullet grown by the
end of 1914 that it quickly put an end to open
warfare. All armies dug themselves into the
earth to avoid it ; the bullet had reduced war-
fare to hugely extended siege operations. Direct
infantry assaults became far too costly and
demoralising to be undertaken except in special
circumstances. The task of breaking the
enemy’s front was handed over, in despair,
to the artillery. The rifle, and its logical
successor, the machine-gun, drove the soldier
underground, there to await the bombardment
by which the enemy hoped to obliterate him.

Such a condition of affairs reduced tactics to
their primitive level. There were rarely flanks
to turn, few mobile bodies of troops to man-
oeuvre, few surprises to effect. The combatant
who commanded the greatest resources of men
and material, and whose troops could best
endure the torments of a prolonged artillery
bombardment carried the day. But during this
warfare of attrition, the omnipotence of the

3*

WAR IN 2030

bullet suggested making the soldier bullet-proof,
enabling him to advance across a buUet-swept
terrain and destroy a vulnerable enemy while
himself invulnerable. In short, the tank was
invented.

It is surprising that the military experts
of the world have drawn so few lessons from the
tank operations during the last war. On no
occasion when an engagement was properly
mounted, were tanks unsuccessful. Although
the machines used were primitive and unreliable,
their effect against infantry was demoralising.
In the tank, there has at last been evolved a
weapon capable of hunting out and destroying
the machine-gun, the presence of which had
made advance impossible. The tank has
disputed and destroyed the omnipotence of
the bullet on the battlefield.

Yet, after the conclusion of the war, the
armies of Europe were once more organised
almost as they had been in 1914. Although
it had been abundantly demonstrated that the
machine-gun made it impossible for infantry
to close with their opponents, the world’s armies

F 33

THE WORLD IN 203O

to-day are largely composed as if infantry still
remained " the Queen of Battles.”

In 1862 a naval duel between the Menimac
and the Monitor occurred in Hampton Roads.
It was one of the minor naval operations of
the American Civil War, but it transformed the
navies of the world. The Merrimac was a fine
steam war-vessel, weU manned, well gunned,
but — unarmoured. By virtue of her defensive
armour the Monitor quickly defeated and
destroyed her larger opponent. On that day
the British Navy possessed one hundred and
forty - nine warships ; but that day’s events
made aU of them, excepting two ironclads,
utterly obsolete.

In exactly the same way, the achievements
of the tank in the last war have made all
military organisations obsolete which do not
take the tank into consideration as a primary
offensive weapon. The Monitor demonstrated
that naval battles must in the future be decided
from behind armour. The tanks at Cambrai,
on November 20, 1917, proved the same lesson
for battles on land.

34

WAR IN 2030

Though for many years to come, however,
both infantry and cavalry will play their part
in mihtary operations, the evolution of the tank,
with its attendant track-carried lorries and mobile
gun-platforms, must revolutionise our ideas of
warfare. Since armies first marched, until the
present day, a commander’s strategy has been
limited by means of communication at his
disposal. Roads, railways, rivers and canals
determined the actions of all arms except the
aerial during the last war. The invention of
mechanical transport capable of rapid cross-
country travel (such transport as equips the
Mechanised Force of the British Army) abolishes
this limitation. A body of troops depending
on such transport can include all terrain, except
the most broken, in its sphere of action. The
earth has become as easily negotiable to the
army of the future as are the seas to our
existing navies.

The whole question of future strategy and
tactics pivots on the development of the tank.
The military mind of 2030 will be formed by
what engineers accomplish in this direction

35

THE WORLD IN 2030

during the next sixty or seventy years. And,
in view of what has been accomplished even
since 1918, I see no limits to the evolution of
mobile fortresses.

Heavy machines capable of fighting their way
across hostile ground at an average speed of
fifteen to twenty miles an hour will be a universal
weapon of all armies before the end of the present
century. In front of them will proceed a cloud
of fast-moving light tanks ; behind them will
come infantry armed with machine-guns and
carried in motor-lorries. The employment of
infantry as a striking force will be discontinued ;
and this arm will be used only to garrison areas
penetrated by tanks, and to protect communi-
cations. Infantry tactics will become purely
defensive.

Cavalry, organised as mounted machine-
gunners, will come into their own again. They
will be immensely useful, both to maintain a
mobile skirmishing line between groups of heavy
tanks as they advance, and also to deal with
enemy units which the tanks leave behind them,
disorganised by their advance. In addition,

36

WAR IN 2030

cavalry will be used for observation and
intelligence work in thickly wooded or very
broken country. Over such terrain as this,
tanks can advance only with difficulty ; nor
are airplanes dependable for information, since
troops concealed in woods cannot be observed
from above.

Such tanks as I have imagined wiU be forced
to depend largely on aerial support as they
advance into hostile country. The supreme
problem of an advance by any mechanised force
is to maintain the fuel supply of its “ spearhead.”
Petrol for the machines, and rations for the
men, of the advanced tank squadrons will be
supplied by large airplanes, protected on their
flight against the enemy air force by swift fighting
machines. Bombing airplanes will also protect
advancing tanks from enemy artillery fire by
searching out and destroying hostile batteries.
Finally, the commanders of tank forces wiU.
be carried in the air above their commands,
and thus will be able to watch the course
of operations and control their progress by
wireless telephony.

37

THE WORLD IN 203O

All these developments in warfare are already
on the way towards realisation. The British
Mechanised Force, as it exists to-day, embodies
each one of them in embryo. Their realisation
cannot long be delayed, and entails a complete
readjustment of the mihtary mind to new
conceptions of strategy and tactics. When a
force such as I have predicted is in being, naval
tactics will become applicable to land warfare.

Since the army of the future will be able
to manoeuvre at its commander’s desire, it will
have escaped from “ communications ” as we
understand them to-day. Thus the supreme
problem of the last war will have vanished.
By 1918 it was possible to penetrate an
enemy line, but the mere physical difficulty of
suppljdng rations, ammunition and reinforce-
ments across country which had been devastated
by repeated bombardments prevented such
penetrations from being adequately exploited.
Offensives, both Allied and German, after
brilliantly achieving their primary objectives,
were first retarded and then paralysed by this
cause.

38

WAR IN 2030

Partially mechanised warfare of this descrip-
tion will certainly be more humane than the
campaigning of the past. Since the horse will
have vanished from the supply columns, the
slaughter of thousands of patient dumb beasts
wiU no longer be one of the most unhappy
accompaniments of a battle. Since the
infantryman wiU no longer trudge through
the chumed-up mud of intensive bombard-
ments, bearing with him nearly a hundredweight
of equipment, much of the sheer physical
exhaustion and squalor of his lot will disappear.
Since the heaviest fighting will be borne by men
protected behind armour-plate, the casualties
of an engagement will diminish.

It is argued by the opponents of tanks (and
tanks have their enemies, just as railways, motor-
cars, and airplanes had theirs) that they are
little better than "death-traps” in battle. Facts
contradict this contention. During the last
war the percentage of casualties in the Tank
Corps was the lowest of all arms ; nor is this
figure misleading through the personnel of the
corps being- less often engaged than the men of

39

THE WORLD IN 2030

other units. After the first appearance of their
machines, the Tank Corps led assaults far more
frequently than infantrymen.

Battles in the last war were generally de-
cided by artillery bludgeoning carried out on a
stupendous scale. Weight of material and smooth
organisation were the conditions of success.
Except in minor operations there was no scope
for mihtary genius as it was understood by the
great captains of history. The future develop-
ment of mechanised warfare will release the
tactician from his impotence. Manoeuvre and
surprise wiU once again hold the supremacy with
which Marlborough and Napoleon invested them.
Brain will again control the issues on the battle-
field ; mere weight of artillery will not be able
to paralyse the cunning and insight of a talented
general.

I do not imagine, however, that the evolu-
tion of warfare will halt at this stage of partial
mechanisation. Ultimately all arms will be
mechanised. Cavalry will give place to swi^
light armoured vehicles armed with a heavy
machine-gun. Such machines will presumably

40

WAR IN 2030

traverse any country across which a horse can
progress, with the exception of various hill-
tracks and dense woods. The reconnaissance
of such areas will, therefore, be carried out either
aerially in the former case or on foot in the
latter. Infantry, unless protected by tanks,
will grow increasingly vulnerable to the attacks
of enemy tanks or airplanes, as it travels in its
cross-country lorries ; these lorries, therefore,
will gradually evolve into armoured vehicles
protected by machine-guns. Thus, the infantry
will travel in a makeshift tank ; and the con-
version of this armoured lorry into a tank proper
must be the next step. At the present day,
the British army possesses a few mobile gun-
platforms — self-propelling machines on which a
field gun is mounted, and from which it can be
fired while in motion. The transition from this
conglomerate of tractor and gun into a tank is
also inevitable. Thus all arms, except the air,
will be reduced to tanks of various descriptions,
each designed to fulfil some special function.
Such a development has, of course, as its
goal the theoretically perfect war-machine, a

G 41

THE WORLD IN 2030

submersible battleship capable also of flying in
the air and travelling across the land. Though
many will deride this conception as fantastic,
its attainment is certainly not to be lightly
dismissed, although for many years to come
such an engine of war, if constructed, would be
no more than a curiosity of military history.

Nevertheless, an experimental floatable tank
has already been constructed ; and in the
development of such amphibious machines
many of the more acute military intellects
foresee the trend of military progress.

Imagine for a moment the course of British
military operations against a hostile power, were
our army equipped with such machines. No
sooner is war declared than the fleet, carrying
with it an expeditionary force, and covered
from surprise by aircraft, makes its way with all
speed to the shores of enemy territory. The
warships, and the vessels they have convoyed,
anchor some miles from the land, and disgorge
a swarm of amphibious tanks. These swim
to the shore, climb the beach, and pene-
trate inland without delay. A landing of this

42

WAR IN 2030

kind would probably never be contested ; for,
since the whole operation might be completed
in an hour, it could be planned as a complete
surprise.

Once the first wave of tanks is ashore, others
follow, protecting amphibious workshops and
supply lorries. Moving at an average speed of
ten miles an hour, and re-fuelled by airplanes
whose base is the fleet, a powerful raiding force
may penetrate two hundred miles into hostile
territory within twenty-four hours of sighting
its shores.

The possibilities of such a raid are incalculable.
Screened by the tank force, temporary airplane-
bases could be established, so that aircraft
returning from bombing expeditions need not
fly all the way back to the fleet for supplies.
Similarly the fleet could send out landing parties
whose object would be the destruction of this
or that object of strategic importance. If the
whole raid were competently planned and
controlled, a small force, exploiting the initial
surprise to the fifll, could so disorganise a nation
as to force its almost immediate surrender. At

43

THE WORLD IN 203O

the worst, retreating before superior armaments,
the tanks could reach a coastal rendezvous
hundreds of miles from where they disembarked
and regain the vessels which transported them
from the coasts of Britain.

Some military prophets are bold enough to
peer even further into the future, where they
foresee battles between hosts of giant tanks
directed by wireless from a distant control room.
These speculations have an origin in the fact
that it is already possible to manoeuvre a
crewless target-ship for naval gunnery practice
by means of wireless telegraphy.

If and when wireless control of distant
mechanisms is perfected, it would be possible to
control the manoeuvres of a squadron of tanks,
and even to lay and fire their guns by its aid.
Hence the contending armies of tanks may be
able to go into battle entirely unmanned ; and
the issue of the day will be decided by two men,
each of them directing his country's entire land
armament.

The control room whence such battles would
be fought might either be carried high over the

44

WAR IN 2030

chosen field in an airplane, or else situated
underground, secure from hostile bombardment.
In the latter case each tank will carry in its
nose a television transmitter, in order that a
panorama of the battlefield may be thrown
on a screen before the eyes of the general
controUing operations. But this is perhaps
further ahead than Hes within the scope of
this article.

What is certain is that in the future as in
the past, victory in warfare will fall to those
who command the most efficient weapons. To
intelligent historians this fact has been obvious
since history became an organised branch of
knowledge. The eagles of Rome went down
before the cavalry shock-tactics of barbarian
lancers. The chivalry of France fell beneath
a cloud of English " cloth-yard ” shafts at Crecy
and Poictiers. The Dervishes at Omdurman
were routed by the rifle.

Yet, curiously, throughout history, the mili-
tary mind has opposed the introduction of
every newly discovered and superior weapon.
During the American War of Independence an

45

THE WORLD IN 303O

enterprising British officer produced a breech-
loading rifle of his own design. Being a man
of considerable private means, he caused a
number of these weapons to be manufactured
and equipped his men with them. Soon after-
wards he fell sick ; no sooner was he
incapacitated than Lord Cornwallis, his superior
officer, confiscated all the new rifles and ordered
them to be destroyed. Again, early in the
1850’s it was proposed that the Minie rifle should
be introduced as the standard weapon of the
British Army. Sir William Napier, indignant
at the idea, denounced it as a subversive attempt
to transform our infantry into " long range
assassins.” And we all remember what Sir
Henry Wilson and others thought of the Tanks
in 1917.

It is profitless to multiply such examples of
the distaste with which military men view
improvements in their own sphere. This
obscurantism is not confined to any one army
or nation ; it is world-wide and appears to have
flourished since the first despised innovator
twanged the string of the first bow. It is left

46

WAR IN 2030

to civilians of vision to persuade the military
authorities that they can wage war more cheaply
and efficiently.

This idiosyncrasy of the military tempera-
ment makes it difficult to prophesy the future
of warfare. Only during the actual progress
of hostilities are the best civilian brains of any
nation turned to solving the problems of war.
In times of peace more productive and better
remunerated work engages their attention.
Nevertheless, it is worth considering whether
the rapid development of weapons, far superior
to those commanded by any possible antagonist,
is not the most effective means any people can
take to ensure uninterrupted peace. Had
Napoleon’s army been provided with even the
least efficient of breech-loading rifles, he need
not have feared the result at Waterloo. And
had Wellington been aware that his opponents
were so armed, he would never have tried
conclusions, since to do so would have
involved the total destruction of his forces.

Similarly in the future no nation whose troops
are armed with a novel and more efficient

47

THE WORLD IN 203O

weapon than any hitherto employed, need fear
to he embroiled in a war of another’s making
until the general world-level of armament had
reached its own.

All this speculation may seem vain, since
hundreds of thousands of well-informed men
confidently beheve that there will never be
another war. Certainly greater precautions
against war have latterly been taken than ever
before in human record ; and the machinery
of these precautions rather than the spirit of
them may prevent many disputes among nations
from flaring up into wars. Unfortunately,
hundreds of thousands of well-informed men
have been of the same opinion after all the
great wars of history. In their lifetime a
memory of the horrors of war has kept peace.
But their sons, who knew not war, have
taken their place and, ignoring their fathers’
experience, have gone to battle, deeming a
just war better than an unjust peace.

48

INDUSTRY IN 2030.

INDUSTRY IN 203O

T here can never be an industrial counter-
revolution. Nothing could transform
Britain into a nation of forty million yeomen
farmers and peasant proprietors ; the acreage of
the British Isles could not support such a swarm
of agriculturists. Stan’ation and a frantic
return to the factories would be the inevitable
conclusions of any large-scale ” Back to the
Land ” experiment. England is not the only
nation in such a case. France, Germany, Italy
and the United States of America are also unable
to support their populations above starvation
level except by the creation of exportable wealth
through highly organised industry. Poignantly
as many economists, philosophers and poets
may deplore the fact, the next century wiU
not lead us back to the farm from the factory. ,
The future holds an increasing concentration
and complexity for industry. Our descendants

H

49

THE WORLD IN 2030

will consider the factory as the unit of civilisa-
tion, rather than the household or the village.
It is the object of the present chapter to speculate
what the factory will be like and what manner
of industry wiU be carried on under its roof.

Two phenomena of capital importance lie
in the path of industry’s developments — the
end of the coal age and the gradual extinction
of agriculture. Each of them is of paramount
importance, for the very existence of nations
will depend on the steps taken to cope with their
consquences.

The end of the coal age wdl be highly serious
for Britain ; our entire industrial fabric is at
present built upon a foundation of coal. Our
industrialists have grown up in the pleasant
faith that our supremacy as a manufacturing
centre was as inevitable as the sunrise, some-
thing divinely appointed as part of the order
of nature. Since 1918, event after event has
contradicted this simple arrogance, but it remains
embedded in thousands of minds which cannot
realise that good fortune and an abundance
of coal created British industrial prosperity in

50

INDUSTRY IN 2O3O

the nineteenth century. Our countrymen are
responsible for most of the basic inventions
which followed the introduction of steam-power
to industry. Locomotives, steamships, blast
furnaces, power looms and spinning machines
were all exploited in Britain before they were
introduced abroad. Consequently for thirty
years our industrialists were able to steal a
march on their foreign competitors in the
markets of the world ; and, until the outbreak
of the war in 1914 staunched the flow of
British exports, no rival could make good this
handicap.

I have recalled this weU-knowm economic
history in order to show how fortuitous were
the root causes underlying our past prosperity,
and to indicate that there is no inherent reason
why it should continue when coal ceases to be
important as a source of power. Scientists
promise that either by releasing intra-molecular
energy, or by harnessing the tides, they can
produce such immense stores of available energy
that power will cost only a nominal amount.
One or another of these solutions of the power

51

THE WORLD IN 2030

problem will be reached in the course of the
next hundred years. By A.D. 2030 coal will
be a fuel of the past.

Will Britain’s industrial importance outlast
the coal age ? Will the world’s industrial
centres of gravity shift from the North-West
of Europe and the Eastern half of the United
States of America ? Will the commercial centre
of the British Empire be transferred to Canada,
India or Australia ?

All these things are possible. At present
industry is chained to the mouths of the world’s
coal-pits. Steel manufacture, for example,
is pursued on a great scale only where iron ores
and coal are readily available together. Often,
the localities where coal is found are otherwise
■unsuitable for industrial undertakings ; the end
of the coal age will terminate the importance
of such areas. Other districts, at present
almost uninhabited, may well become industrially
important in the future, when some advantage
which they possess becomes valuable. For
example, the Himalayas are provided by nature
■with an abundance of waterfalls ; capable, when

52

INDUSTRY IN 2030

harnessed, of generating vast supplies of
electricity. It is probable that before 2030 an
intensive industrial hfe will grow up among the
foothills of this mighty range, drawing its
hfe-blood from great power-stations high in the
gorges and ravines of the mountains. At present
the population of this region at the Himalayas’
foot averages under sixteen to the square mile,
while the fertile valley of the Ganges supports
well over two hundred and fifty agriculturists
to the square mile. Sometime in the twenty-
first century the condition may be reversed.
The peasant farmer of the river valley will
become the factory worker of the hills, and the
banks of the Ganges may be peaceful and
deserted where now they swarm with busy
life.

The valley of the Rhone and Northern Italy
are two European districts which abound in
natural water-power. Both are comparatively
remote from coalfields, and this fact has
hitherto prevented their full industrial develop-
ment. But already some part of the available
water power is being exploited ; railways are being

53

THE WORLD IN 2O3O

electrified, factories built, machinery installed.
Within a very few years the Rhone valley —
and not, as at present, the Lille district — may
be the most important industrial region of
France. Italy, for the first time in her history,
as a united nation, may develop into one of the
most productive manufacturing countries of the
world.

I do not, however, believe that Britain’s
industrial importance will diminish when coal
is no longer mined for fuel. If our industrialists
are quick to read the signs of the times, they
will be prepared to adapt themselves to the
new era. They will seize the opportunity of
utilising the new power— whatever it may be —
rather than cling stubbornly to coal-generated
electricity. Possibly it may happen that the
power problem will be solved by an English-
man ; that the tides wiU be harnessed or
molecular energy first liberated in this country.
Then, of course, Britain will enjoy another
start over foreign competitors, such as she
gained when steam-power was introduced. The
advantages in this case, however, will not be so

54

INDUSTRY IN 203O

considerable, because to-day all civilised peoples
are organised industrially, and on the alert to
snatch every piece of burrowed knowledge from
even the shghtest scientific discovery.

Wherever the power problem is solved, it
is essential that our industry should be among
the first to apply the solution to its needs.
If this is done, I am convinced that our
geographical position, Imperial connections and
long experience in manufactures of aU kinds
Will assure us a continuance of prosperity. Nor
need we suppose that, because coal will no
longer be useful as a fuel, its whole value will
have vanished. The “ fine chemical " industry
already obtains a large proportion of its raw
materials from the products of the destructive
distillation of coal. And thus, when coal no
longer supplies power, it will still be mined to
provide the needs of this industry, which is
certain to acquire an ever-increasing importance
in the future.

The decay and ultimate extinction of agri-
culture will inflict even graver problems on the
world than the end of the coal-age. At present

55

THE WORLD IN 2030

agriculture remains the fundamental industry
of the human race ; it employs the largest
numbers of men, and on its prosperity depends
the wealth of many nations. Yet, as I have
pointed out on a previous page, chemistry
and biology are plotting the ruin of agriculture.
The perfection of a synthetic diet cannot be
delayed far into the twenty-first century ; and
when the first synthetic food factory begins
to undercut the prices of naturally grown food,
the doom of agriculture will be sealed. Synthetic
foods will be cheaper, more palatable, more
various, perhaps more hygienic, than their
natural predecessors. Therefore they will drive
the products of agriculture off the market, and
ruin the farmers of the world. By the year
2030 synthetic bread, sugar and vegetable
substitutes may be cheaper than water is
to-day.

The first consequence of this triumph of
synthetic over natural foodstuffs, will be the
creation of a new industry. The food factory
will replace the farm, and a proportion of erst-
while agricultural countries may endeavour, by

56

INDUSTRY IN 2030

rapidly organising a synthetic food industry,
to stave off the ruin which confronts them.
It is improbable that they will be successful in
the project. Lands like the British Isles, which
now import huge quantities of food, wiU be able
to synthesise within their own borders all the
nourishment their population requires. An
agricultural country, which attempts to export
synthetic foodstuffs wall find no market for
its goods. This is among the first serious
prospects which the future holds. The sudden
impoveri-shment, if not the bankruptcy, of
Denmark, New Zealand, the Argentine and
Canada — to name only a few of the more im-
portant agricultural regions — wmuld disconcert
the financiers and dismay the manufacturers of
the entire world. Of course, these and such
other countries may have discovered new and
non-agricultural sources of wealth long before
synthetic foods kiU agriculture. The discovery
of such sources of wealth should henceforward
occupy the most earnest attention of their
statesmen, economists, and scientists.

Cellulose will be the principal raw material

1

57

THE WORLD IN 2030

from which the synthetic food industry will
manufacture its products. This substance
is universally distributed in the vegetable
republic. Wood, grass, leaves — aU vegetation
is built up of a structure of cellulose. While
it is possible that the necessary amounts will
be synthesised on the spot from elementary
bodies, it is more likely that, for some centuries
at all events, synthetic food factories will depend
on natural cellulose. Presumably this wiU be
grown in the tropics, since vegetation flourishes
best in a warm, damp climate. Science will
discover which plant or tree produces most
cellulose in the shortest period ; and the chosen
species will then be intensely cultivated in every
tropical land. Consequently, as the former
agricultural districts decay, a new and abundant
prosperity will come to tropical South America
centring round the Amazon basin, to the Congo
basin in Africa, to Assam, Burma and the East
Indies.

Agriculture, however, although the chief, is
not the only industry which is doomed in the
future. Agricultural engineering will naturally

58

INDUSTRY IN 203O

decay with the industry on which it is parasitic ;
but more important will be the passing of rubber
and cotton plantations. It is already possible
to synthesise rubber from isoprene in any
ordinarily equipped chemical laboratory. The
process is as yet uneconomic^ for sjmthetic
rubber costs anything up to fifty times the
price of the natural product. It is certain,
however, that this will not long continue ; and
that within a very few years synthetic rubber
(which has the advantage of needing no
refining, as it is pure from the first) will be
produced on an industrial scale at a price which
will soon drive the natural rubber off the
market. The world demand for rubber is
expanding, and the future needs of the motor-
car and electrical industries indicate that the
expansion will continue. The country which
first markets commercial synthetic rubber will
create for itself a most lucrative new industry.

The cotton industry is slightly more com-
plicated, but fundamentally as hopeless as the
case of rubber. Artificial silk is already an
important menace to the existence of cotton

59

THE WORLD IN 203O

spinning and weaving. It seems able to fulfil
every function of cotton, and to fulfil it as
satisfactorily. Materials manufactured from this
substance are more pleasing to the eye and
touch, more desired by women, and yet as
durable as cotton goods. Artificial silk, which
can be produced as cheaply as cotton, will
certainly destroy the cotton industry.

The consequence of the triumph of artificial
silk will be felt in every quarter of the globe.
The prosperity of all cotton-growing lands —
the United States, Egypt, India and Rhodesia
— will decline ; while the two great cotton-
spinning areas, Lancashire and Massachusetts,
will be ruined unless they forestall disaster
by adapting their resources to new demands.
Intensive scientific research has already been
financed, both in Lancashire and the United
States, with the object of discovering a means
whereby cotton can successfully withstand the
challenge of artificial silk. There is much
discussion and promise of all kind of processes
for mercerising cotton thread. But I foresee
that ultimately all this activity will have been

60

INDUSTRY IN 203O

in vain. Artificial silk has already shown itself
the ultimate victor. Cotton is obsolescent.

The world’s cotton workers, from growers to
weavers, might be best advised to realise this
fact and direct their energy towards trans-
forming themselves into an efficient artificial
silk industry.

There are other industries which have not yet
reached their maximum expansion and
prosperity, but whose ultimate decay already
seems unavoidable. Such is the motor-car
industry. At present the world market for
motor-cars has approached saturation point only
in the United States, though during the next
two decades this point will probably be reached
in Europe also. Yet, even when this has
occurred, the motor manufacturers will look
hopefully towards India and China, the world's
two greatest potential markets. Parallel with
this expansion of the motor-car industry, the
development of the airplane will have proceeded.
The arrival of the cheap, fast, convenient family
airplane will first check and then destroy the
prosperity of motor-car manufacturers. By 2030

THE WORLD IN 203O

motor-cars will probably have passed their zenith
of popularity. A century later they will only
be used for shopping, picnics, and the amuse-
ment of youth. They will, in fact, sink to the
level now occupied by the bicycle.

I have confined myself hitherto to con-
sidering which industries will exist and which
disappear in the future. I now pass to a rapid
survey of the problems which will perplex future
industriahsts. Chief among these, I believe,
will be a world-shortage of various, at present
indispensable, metals. Complaints are already
loud that there is not enough tin available to
supply existing demands. The price of this
metal has soared erratically during the past
few years, and although manipulated, it has
remained continually above a certain high level.
This indicates that the shortage is genuine and
not artificial. Malaya and Australia are the
world’s principal sources of tin. Every suspected
vein is explored carefully, and, if tin be found,
the deposit is exploited to the uttermost.
In spite of this hectic activity, the demand
exceeds the supply. Unless extensive . new tin

62

INDUSTRY IN 203O

deposits are discovered in the meantime, the
world of 2030 will be searching feverishly for
tin ; and tin is perhaps the most widely useful
of the non-ferrous metals. The value of this
metal at that time will be incalculable.

A world shortage of copper will accompany
the tin famine. Copper conducts electricity
incomparably better than any other metal ;
the electrical industry uses only copper for the
manufacture of a thousand different articles.
The principal supplies of copper come from mines
in Spain and the United States ; and these
sources are by no means inexhaustible. Since
the use of electricity, both for industrial and
domestic purposes, is certain to increase out
of all calculation in the coming century, a
disastrous scarcity of copper appears inevitable.
Already the more acute among electrical engineers
are facing this problem, and inaugurating a
search for a substitute for this precious metal.
Possibly some patient investigator may discover
an alloy that wiU banish the difficulty. At
present the quest seems almost hopeless.

Even the sources of the best iron ores show

63

THE WORLD IN 203O

signs of exhaustion. Although iron is the most
commonly distributed metal in the world,
deposits of easily worked and readily smelted
ores are not as abundant as might be supposed.
Spain, Northern Sweden, and certain districts
in North America provide the highest grade ore.
Before the end of the first quarter of the twenty-
first century these districts and many others
will have been nearly worked out, and the iron
and steel industry will be faced with the necessity
of working low grade iron ores. The supplies
of these are so abundant and widely distributed
that, no matter how intensive the development
of industry, they wiU sufiice for thousands of
years. Their adoption as the raw material
of the iron and steel industry will, however, call
for the solution of many problems of metallurgy.
Another Bessemer or Siemens is required to
find out how to utilise low grade iron ores and
yet supply the world with cheap steel.

After steel, the most important metal of the
future will be aluminium. Some engineers
believe that it will oust steel from its premier
position among useful metals. At present

64

INDUSTRY IN 2030

aluminium, though infinitely cheaper than when
Gilbert’s Eros of Piccadilly Circus was cast
from it, still remains far too expensive. When
Eros first adorned the Shaftesbury’ fountain,
aluminium was something of a costly curiosity ;
and though aluminium saucepans, airplanes and
motor-car bodies have become commonplace,
the metal must be made stiU cheaper if industry
is to draw from it substantial benefit. The
problem of extracting aluminium from clay
requires solution. All clay contains aluminium
silicate as one of its principal ingredients. The
man who can devise a cheap method of extracting
metallic aluminium from this compound will
live and die a multi-millionaire.

But when all these problems are satisfactorily
solved ; when the crises caused by the end of
the coal age and the decay of agriculture have
been met and overcome ; what will be the
conformation of the industry of the future ?

Wherever the industrial capitals of the wmrld
may be situated, what manner of cities will they
be?

I prophesy that the industry of the future

K 65

THE WORLD IN 203O

will be largely decentralised, as compared with
the industry of to-day. There will be no
districts thick with large towns, such as
disfigure the Black Country, South Lancashire
and Yorkshire. Power wiU be so cheap that
the transport of goods by electrically hauled
railway trains will add little to the cost of their
production. Hence it will not he essential, as
now it is, to situate factories as conveniently
close as possible to both raw materials and
market. Single factories will be scattered far
and wide over the whole countryside, each
supporting the village or small town which
clusters around it. Deserted by agriculture,
and "tamed” by the complete eradication of
weeds and thorns, our countryside will present
a very different aspect from the chequered but
charming irregularity of fields and hedges which
is now so typically England. The country will
probably appear like an interminable park,
broken only by patches of woodland, gardens,
houses and factories.

We need not fear that our descendants’
aesthetic susceptibilities will be deranged by the

66

INDUSTRY IN 2030

sight of these scattered factories. Within the
next hundred years a vital school of industrial
architecture will learn liow to harmonise factory,
landscape, and industrial function into one
pleasing unity. Serious attention is already
being accorded to factory design by the most
eminent American and German architects ; and
there are some indications that this branch of
architecture is not so grossly neglected in Britain
as formerly. Before 2030, architects will have
evolved a real industrial style of building, as
beautifully adapted to its purpose as French
Gothic is for cathedrals, or the symmetries of
Palladio for country mansions.

This dawning attention to industrial archi-
tecture forms but a part of a more or less
unconscious movement towards the evolution of
industrial life. At present, though a century
and a half has elapsed since the industrial
revolution began, we still tolerate a hotch-potch
of industrial and pre-industrial conditions. A
true philosophy of industry, capable of
harmonising capital, labour, factory, manage-
ment, machinery and product has yet to be

67

THE WORLD IN 2030

stated. For lack of it, we fall into constant
disputes, misunderstandings and extravagances;
its evolution will be one of the most important
advances ever accomplished by human wisdom.
Possibly such a philosophic synthesis will only
be unconsciously effected during many years.

The relationship of farmer, beast and soil,
on which agriculture has so long reposed,
emerged from generations of trial and error ;
but this was simple compared with the
complicated industrial balance which we need
to strike. The primitive agriculturists who
evolved agrarian society were certainly not dis-
tinguished for intelligence or self-consciousness.
Perhaps the next two or three generations will
be able to arrive at a working philosophy of
industry more rapidly than these pioneers settled
the future mould of rural existence.

Whatever may be the solution of this funda-
mental problem of industry, it will certainly
be comprehensive and capable of simultaneous
application to an entire countryside. Regional
town planning, architecture, factory design,
communications, population, varieties of

68

INDUSTRY IN 203O

manufacture, social ser\uce — these are only a
few of the factors w’hich will be considered as
one whole by the industry of the future. As
a result the industrial " misfits ” which so
plentifully disfigure our country to-day, will
not be perpetuated. Factories built without
knowledge of functional design, or thought for
their environment ; the compulsion of work-
people to travel many miles to and from their
work ; streets of jerry-built hovels run up to
meet a sudden temporary demand for accom-
modation ; country-sides gashed and disfigured
by haphazard industrial "expansion" — these
things will all cease in the future, because they
are costly, wasteful, and shortsighted.

Although most industries w-ill be decentralised,
there must be exceptions to this rule. Wliatever
solution of the power problem is reached, the
manufacture of electricity will grow increasingly
centralised. If the tides be harnessed, establish-
ments in the Bristol Channel, the Wash, the
Firth of Forth, and Solway Firth, could amply
supply the United Kingdom with electrical
energy. Sub-stations would be scattered up and

69

THE WORLD IN 203O

down the land, transforming and distributing
the power transmitted to them by the four
great generating plants ; but on these four
plants alone the whole nation could depend for
heat, light, and power. If intra-molecular
energy be tapped and utilised, the same state
would arise. For economy in machinery and
personnel, only a few extremely large power-
stations would be built, where abundant
electricity would be generated by the agency
of intra-molecular energy.

One obvious drawback can be urged against
such an arrangement. Any political group
which obtained even temporary control of these
few generating stations could hold the nation to
ransom. It would be idle to attempt to dislodge
by bombardment a party of pohtical adventurers
who captured such a station, because the
destruction of the plant would dislocate the
life and industry of a dozen countries. The
only method of protecting such places will be
for the government to ensure that no disaffected
or hostile person ever crossed the threshold. This
could be done by handing over their conduct

70

INDUSTRY IN 203O

and maintenance to a new body of disinterested
civil ser%mnts, a corps akin to the Royal Engineers
in traditions and intelligence. A less formidable
difficulty will be to protect the generating stations
from hostile gunfire and aerial bombardment
in times of war.

The superabundance of cheap power, which
these stations will make available, wlU plainly
decrease costs of production very substantially.
Since power will serve every industry equally,
the cost of raw materials to the manufacturer
will likewise decrease, consequently the prices
of manufactured articles (e.g. machinery, hard-
ware, tools) will drop sensationally, even though
the operatives engaged in their making are paid
generously large wages. Wealth will be created
far more easily in the future than at present ;
and, after a period of accumulation, a permanent
state of high wages and low prices will be
established.

As wealth accumulates to an ever greater
extent, the community w^ill profit by the gradual
contraction of the working week. Mr. Henry
Ford, the American motor-car manufacturer,

71

THE WORLD IN 203O

can already economically afford to pay his
employees a minimum wage of a pound a day for
five days’ work a week. He looks forward
confidently to the inauguration of the four
day week in industry ; and he can even prophesy
the coming of a three day week. He foresees
all this in a coal and oil era, while the power
question still remains in its present condition.
The advent of cheap power will accelerate and
increase the curtailment of the working week.
By 2030 it is probable that the average " week ”
of the factory hand will consist of sixteen or
perhaps twenty -four hours.

This will mean that industry takes a smaller
place in human life. At present man is too
often the slave of his machines. When he has
attained to a sixteen hour working week he will
be their master. This week will indicate that
human ingenuity has solved the problem of
enabling all men to earn a comfortable living
for themselves and their dependants, while en-
joying long periods of leisure. No man will
grudge the one or two days he passes at work
in a factory, when he considers that, as its

INDUSTRY IN 2030

reward, it brings him five or six days of freedom
from financial anxiety. It will not be often
that his one day a week will be made laborious
by specially hard work ; superintending the
operations of the giant machines of tw'o hundred
years hence will be supremely easy — and
supremely dull.

This industrial Arcadia, pleasant though it
seems and possible though its realisation is,
possesses its peculiar disadvantages. Industry
will grow so complicated, inter-dependent and
scientific, that no 6ne outside the technically
trained manager will be able to grope his way
through its intricacies. Industrial science will
become as remote from ordinary affairs as
mathematics is to-day ; business men will
develop a technical jargon as secret as higher
algebra. And so the industrialist will pass
beyond the ken and out of the control of
the ordinary citizen.

If he begins to act in a manner inimical or
injurious to his fellows, how can he be checked ?
The ramifications of his affairs ^vill be so inter-
minable that it win be hard, unless one shares

THE WORLD IN 2030

his secrets, to connect cause with effect. Even
if the guilt for this action or that can be
fastened on any particular industrial leader, how
can the State bring him to account ? If
threatened with pains and penalties, he can
answer with a certain justice that he is the
State ; that the very existence of his fellow
citizens turns on his continued interest in
managing his business. He can laugh at the
law, because, if the law harms him, he can
retaliate by throwing out of gear one of the
essential wheels in the mechanism of material
hfe. Unless his undertaking functions smoothly,
a whole industry will stand stiH. Every
industry will be a key industry.

Probably such a case wiU never arise ; if
only because the interests of management and
the ordinary citizen need never diverge. It is
instructive, however, to envisage the possibility of
a truculent manufacturer holding up the life of a
nation. The world certainly moves towards an
intensification of industrial Hfe, and towards a
collaboration between industries which will make
possible the success of such a solitary rebellion,

74

INDUSTRY IN 2030

All these speculations, however, will be vain
if wars distract the progress and dissipate the
wealth of ci^■ilised nations. The development
of industry is only possible in time of peace.
War perverts and prostitutes the purpose of
industry, strangles some of its branches and
swells others to dropsical dimensions. War
takes no account of economics, of distribution,
of markets, of prices.

War may kill industry, unless industry, by
internationalising the production of wealth,
first kills war.

75

THE WORLD IN 2O3O

his secrets, to connect cause with effect. Even
if the guilt for this action or that can be
fastened on any particular industrial leader, how
can the State bring him to account ? If
threatened with pains and penalties, he can
answer with a certain justice that he is the
State ; that the very existence of his fellow
citizens turns on his continued interest in
managing his business. He can laugh at the
law, because, if the law harms him, he can
retaliate by throwing out of gear one of the
essential wheels in the mechanism of material
hfe. Unless his undertaking functions smoothly,
a whole industry will stand stiU. Every
industry rvill be a key industry.

Probably such a case will never arise ; if
only because the interests of management and
tlie ordinary citizen need never diverge. It is
instructive, however, to envisage the possibility of
a truculent manufacturer holding up the life of a
nation. The world certainly moves towards an
intensification of industrial life, and towards a
collaboration between industries which will make
possible the success of such a solitary rebellion.

74

INDUSTRY IN 2030

All these speculations, however, will be vain
if wars distract the progress and dissipate the
wealth of civilised nations. The development
of industry is only possible in time of peace.
War perverts and prostitutes the purpose of
industry, strangles some of its branches and
swells others to dropsical dimensions. War
takes no account of economics, of distribution,
of markets, of prices.

War may kill industr}^ unless industry, by
internationalising the production of wealth,
first kills war.

75

EVERYDAY LIFE IN 2030

NY attempt to forecast the daily lives of
Jr\. our descendants a hundred years hence,
must primarily concern itself with the instinctive
mental assumptions which are likely to be current
among normal men and women in the year
2030.

A universal acceptance of the dogmas of
Roman Catholic Christianity conditioned the
nature of that civilisation which we loosely
consider as the ” Middle Ages.” The Feudal
System of land tenure with its concomitant
social pyramid-capped by the mystical and
anointed person of God's regent, the King, and
supported on the bowed backs of a semi-sei'vile
peasantry tied to the land they cultivated —
depended for its very existence on the sanctions
and machinery of the Roman Catholic Church.
The Feudal System determined the life of all
Christendom through several centuries ; no man

76

EVERYDAY LIFE IN 2030.

EVERYDAY LIFE IN 203O

escaped the rigid classifications, or might
presume to challenge its efficacy unpunished.
When the Renaissance, followed by the
Reformation, destroyed the universal acceptance
of Catholicism, Feudal Society dissolved and
vanished.

The belief that the City State was the most
admirable variety of commonwealth, involved
Italy in some seven centuries of civil war and
political instability. The same faith, impressed
on the Greek world by Plato, was the ultimate
cause which left the highest civilisation evolved
by human intelligence an easy prey to the
onslaughts of Macedonia.

Similar examples of how beliefs condition
the lives of nations might be multiplied, for the
essence of history consists in detecting and
analysing the relationship between ideals and
their social results. The two I have already
mentioned, however, will serve to indicate that
the religious, economic, and philosophic faiths
of our descendants, at least as much as the
material resources at their command, will regulate
the daily round of their existence.

77

THE WORLD IN 203O

In common with my readers, I believe myself
to live in a universe of three-dimensional
Euclidian space, on a globe resembling an orange
in shape, which circles, as one among several
planets, round the sun — ^itself a small and “very
ordinary “ star, among the millions of such
masses of incandescent gas which are disposed
in empty space.

All these surprising facts concerning the
universe I accept as true. They form an
integral part of my mental background, I
believe in them as implicitly as a thirteenth-
century peasant believed in a personal Devil
and a material Hell. However, I believe in
them for exactly the same reason — because
I have been assured of their truth by persons
who appear to deserve credence. It is certain
that by years of application and experiment
I could check all the evidence which science
advances in support of her conception of the
universe ; and, to this extent, I am in a
position superior to that enjoyed by my
thirteenth-century predecessor, who could not
expect independently to verify his belief

78

EVERYDAY LIFE IN 20$0

in Hell without first ending his earthly career.
But I am exactly his equal in credulity. Con-
cerning departments of life in which I have
no personal experience, I unhesitatingly accept
the best opinion of experts in those departments,
and mould my conduct in accordance with a
faith in that opinion.

My descendants in 2030 wiU certainly continue
in my example, as I in that of my ancestors ;
but they will believe in a very different universe
from mine. The full imphcations of Professor
Einstein’s theories have yet to be explored,
but beyond a doubt they wiU revolutionise
human conceptions of space, time and the
material universe. By 2030 Einsteinian physics
will provide the instinctive background to all
men's minds. Exactly how the universe will
appear to our descendants cannot easily now
be predicted ; probably it will be as different
from our own as this is from a mediaeval's,
who firmly regarded the sun as a planet of
a flat earth.

Before this revolution is accomplished, there
will occur a transitive period, during which

79

THE WORLD IN 2030

Newtonian and Einsteinian conceptions, contra-
dictory though they may be, will simultaneously
colour men’s minds. The possibility of a logical
contradiction passing unperceived, even by a
powerful intellect, is afforded in Paradise
Lost. Milton ranks as perhaps the most
learned of the English poets ; yet in his epic,
he assumes the truth both of Ptolemaic
astronomy, which fixed the earth as the
immovable centre of the universe, and of
the then new-fashioned Galilean system, which
recognised the earth as a planet of the sun.

The fact that our descendants will have ab-
sorbed Einstein by 2030 presupposes that they
will receive a far greater measure of scientific
education than is now usual. The whole ten-
dency of modern life places increasing reliance
on the methods and mental apparatus of science.
One after another differing branches of know-
ledge are being reduced to sciences, where results
and discoveries may be exactly expressed in
the invariable terms of mathematical expression.
Biology, various departments of medicine, and
physiology to-day approach the exactitude of

80

EVERYDAY LIFE IN 2030

-expression which formerly distinguished only
physics among natural sciences.

This taste among the scientists for mathe-
matical methods has grown because it satisfies
the modem mental complexion ; because we
believe in reducing truths of nature to succinct
symbols common to aU languages; because we
trust in the infallibility of mathematics, where
our forefathers believed in the infallibility of
St. Thomas Aquinas.

In consequence of this belief our descendants
of 2030 will express themselves and their
personalities largely through the channels and
machinery of science. An almost blind faith in
science distinguishes our fives to-day. This
faith, I suggest, wfil deepen in intensity through-
out the twentieth century ; untfi. by 2030 it
may well dominate human fife as thoroughly as
a belief in current Roman Catholic theology
dominated the Middle Ages.

We believe in our physicians as firmly as the
naked African believes in his witch-doctor. We
do their bidding, though the prescribed regimen
frequently involves inconvenience, absurdity and

M 81

THE WORLD IN 2O3O

little short of actual hardship. We frame laws
and modify society in accordance with their
instructions. Their grip upon the body politic
has grown even firmer than the sway exercised
over the minds of former statesmen by such
doctrinaire economists as Adam Smith, Ricardo,
and Bentham. But by 2030 doctors of medicine
will not be the only scientific specialists whose
decisions wiU modify the life and conduct of the
normal citizen.

During the next century, biology promises
definite and sweeping advances. The secrets
of human heredity will certainly receive
elucidation ; the vague nonsense which now
masquerades as " eugenics," will be replaced
by an exact science. Its experts will claim,
for example, to predict with accuracy the
physical and mental nature of the children born
of any particular marriage. Suppose that it is
established beyond doubt that the union of
A with B must inevitably produce children of
a type C, congenitally criminal and mentally
repulsive. Then, no matter what outcry is
raised by the adherents of various religious

82

EVERYDAY LIFE IN 203O

denominations, the State will certainly legislate
either to prohibit, or compulsorily to sterilise,
such a marriage.

Conversely, when the eugenist can predict
that the marriage of D with E must inevitably
produce offspring of robust physique, endowed
with first-class intelligence, that State will perish
which does not actively encourage such unions
among its citizens.

Both these eugenic predictions and many
more of a similar nature will be commonplace
in 2030. Consequently young people, who
contemplate marriage, will first be forced to
discover what variety of children their union
would produce ; and the mating of certain types,
themselves innocuous, known to be disastrous
in its consequences, will be sternly prohibited.

Such proposals sound repugnant, but in
essence they are reasonable and even romantic.
At present, by segregating them in prisons
during the major portion of their adult life, we
place an effective brake upon the fecundity of
our incurable criminals. Our descendants will
adopt the more effective precaution of preventing

83

THE WORLD IN 2030

the birth of those who must inevitably grow
up with antisocial proclivities. Prevention is
better than Broadmoor.

A similar reliance upon, and belief in, the
results of science will constrain, not only the
choice of a spouse, but all the other individual
acts of will of our descendants. I am persuaded,
on good authority, that by 2030 psychology
too will rank among the exact sciences,

I am aware that already to-day many learned
professors claim psychology as a science. They
are premature. It remains a branch of learning
in which a great mass of varied and seemingly
contradictory facts has been amassed ; but
whose inchoate complexities have never been
simplified in the light of comprehensive and
tenable theory. The essence of a scientific
theory consists in its power not only to account
for all the ascertained facts, but also to induce
new discoveries in its particular sphere. It
is notorious that to-day as many " theories ”
of psychology flourish as professors exist to
live upon them.

Psychology remains in the condition from

84

EVERYDAY LIFE IN 2O3O

which the Atomic Theory raised chemistry.
Nevertheless I believe that during the present
century a Dalton will illuminate it by postulating
a theory to co-ordinate all its data, and to expose
the workings of the human mind with scientific
certainty.

When this psychological theory arrives ;
when a belief in its truth grows established
in the common mind ; a prodigious revolution
in everyday life must occur.

At present crude and blundering psychological
methods are employed by all who seek to
influence their fellow-men — ^by propagandists,
advertisers, pla3rwrights and, above all, by
politicians. On the day when psychology is
reduced to an exact science, the advertiser who
hopes to attract custom by a specially coloured
poster will be impotent against the scientific
expert, able to compound an advertisement
which, he can predict, must fascinate every
beholder possessed of a certain mentality. The
author relying for a living on the sales of
novels, produced as works of art, will starve
when books written so that their appeal is

85

THE WORLD IN 203O

inevitable and irresistible are first issued by
astute publishing houses. The playwright whose
scenes are salted merely by his own native wit,
will not hold the stage against plays whose
lines are peppered with verbal felicities guaran-
teed by psychological theory to bring down
the house.

These are perhaps far-fetched examples, but
they illustrate the inevitable consequences of
the reduction of psychology to an exact science.
In sober truth, this event — and it is an event
which ivill happen, not one which may happen
— will transform all our everyday occupations
and pleasures.

Most particularly it will revolutionise politics.
In any society, however organised, political power
depends on the abihty to persuade the most
powerful section of citizens that a certain regime
is desirable. In democracies that section is the
electoral majority ; in other states it may be
an armed and powerful minority organised to
discipline the majority to its will. In democracies
the electorate may be persuaded to favour one
party rather than another by appeals to blind

86

EVERYDAY LIFE IN 203O

prejudice, ignoble passions, and unreasoning fears.
Nor has the party manager at his disposal any
certain means of prophesying which variety of
appeal will carry the day in a general election —
whether reasoned argument, patriotic sentiment
or mere rhetoric. A scientific psychology will
abruptly dispel such uncertainties. No political
party will enjoy the chance of stampeding the
nation in its own favour, once such a science
is established.

Scientific psychology may destroy the possi-
bility of conducting politics any longer on purely
party lines. The voters, educated in the light
of the new psychology, will be immune from
specious appeals to sentiment and illogical
reasoning. They will be competent to support
this or that project strictly on its merits, un-
swayed by rhetoric, unhampered by prejudice.

That our present party system, or anything
remotely resembling it, could survive under such
conditions, is unlikely. The main conflicts would
arise temporarily between the adherents and
opponents of a projected measure. For example,
a dispute such as now rages between the partisans

87

THE WORLD IN 2030

of the gold standard and those other economists,
who deem our present industrial depression the
certain fruit of a too hasty return to the gold
standard after the war, might well be imagined
as distracting the political world of 2030. But
a fixed and deep cleavage of opinion, comparable
to that which divides the present constitutional
parties from the Communists will be impossible ;
because the trained minds of the nation will
be satisfied that the philosophy which inspires
one of these parties is true, and its converse
false.

Instead of party politics, our descendants will
probably be content with the rule of experts,
who will seek popular sanction for each
measure they purpose through a referendum.
Naturally they will account it an honour to be
chosen to the Parliament of skilled governors ;
and the qualifications necessary for selection
to it will be exacting and formidable. I do
not believe that so sweeping a modification as
this in our institutions will be wholly completed
by the year 2030 ; nor do I imagine that it will
be effected by any sudden violence of change.

88

EVEEYDAY LIFE IN 203O

It win occur gradually and inevitably, once
party politics are paralysed by the growth of
psychology to the ordered logic of an exact
science.

Another among our almost unconscious faiths
which will mould the everyday life of 2030 is
our belief in the value of education, To-day
we expend an increasing proportion of the
nation’s revenue on education of every variety.
A dispassionate observer would not greatly mis-
judge us were he to conclude that we attach a
mystical and supernatural value to education for
its own sake. From the clamorously expressed
opinions of many educationalists he might
deduce that we consider schooling the young,
whatever the results the treatment produces,
in the light of a holy occupation.

Personally I share the faith of my generation,
and believe that every child should receive the
opportunity of obtaining the best and most
thorough education which scientific pedagogues
can devise. And here, in parenthesis, I may
observe that every English-speaking boy and
girl of ability at present enjoys such an

N 89

THE WORLD IN 2O3O

opportunity to a degree unknown in other lands
or other ages. But I do not believe that the
normal curriculum of higher education which
exists in this country is equally suitable to train
all natures and aptitudes. At present our
educational machine is designed to fit its
products for a certain range of activities — for
government service, the law, medicine, teaching.
Its elasticity is controlled, and inevitably so, by
the requirements of certain boards of examiners,
and the current notions of scholarship accepted
by our Universities.

In 2030 a greatly modified and extended
educational system will influence the life and
manners of our descendants. As I forecast in a
previous chapter, the problem of the ordinary
citizen a century hence will not concern his
working hours, but his leisure. During each
month, he may spend one week engaged in
monotonous but enormously productive toil.
In return for this labour he will receive wages
sufficient to maintain himself and his family
in superb comfort through three following weeks
of complete leisure. Unless he is a highly

90

EVERYDAY LIFE IN 203O

educated individual, so much idleness will hang
heavy on his hands, if indeed it is not filled
by actively mischievous pursuits. Three con-
secutive weeks of continuous football-match
attendance, cinema-going, betting, crossword
solving and newspaper reading • would cloy
upon even the most determined of uneducated
hedonists. Therefore it will be necessary for
the citizen of 2030 to command intellectual
amusements with which to occupy his days.
The creation of wealth, however, will have
grown so simple by 2030, that the State will
be able to afford a complete education for each
of her children. Every child, as a matter of
course, will pass on from school to university ;
not until he reaches his majority will the youth
of 2030 be faced with the task of earning his
own living. The training he receives will be
far more complete and various than can now be
obtained. Educational experts will make a
careful study of each pupil who passes through
their hands, with the aim of discovering for what
activity nature and inchnation best equip him.
Who shows a bent for scientific inquiry will be

91

THE WORLD IN 203O

trained as a researcli worker, and enabled to join
the ranks of those searchers after truth who
will form the governing class. Wlrose mastery
over his fellows is apparent will be qualified
for an executive position where he may best
employ his gift for handling men. Whose
gifts are manual rather than mental will learn
the secrets of a craft, and devote his life to
adorning the lives of his fellows.

All this, idyllic in contemplation, will be
rendered practical by the conquest of poverty ;
and, for reasons which I have previously out-
lined, I believe that by 2030 this conquest,
though not complete, will be in sight.

Universal higher education, however, may
entail awkward and unforeseen consequences in
ordinary domestic life. Girls, of course, no less
than boys, will be given the chance to discover
what work best suits their abilities. In conse-
quence many thousands of young and intelligent
women will grow up devoted to this art or that
science. Such devotion will not, presumably,
debar them from marriage. But the faculty
for self-expression, once practised, is hard to

92

EVERYDAY LIFE IN 203O

discontinue, and I imagine that these young
women, in the intervals left to them by eugenic
child-bearing and devotion to their husbands,
will desire to continue their chosen careers.
They will have little time or incHnation for
domestic tasks. Running a household will
not appeal to them as a suitable activity for an
intelligent and vital woman.

Servants, moreover, to whom they might
delegate such tasks, wiU certainly have ceased
to exist in a world where thirteen weeks’ labour
in a year can produce a comfortable competence.

It is certain, therefore, that the ordinary
household arrangements which suffice to-day,
will prove inadequate for the needs of 2030.
In spite of the myriad “ labour-saving devices
which will doubtless have multiplied by that
date, and will have converted the Enghsh
domestic interior into the semblance of a
machine shop, many married couples wiU find
housekeeping beyond their powers. Perhaps
they may find refuge in large communal
estabhshments, equipped with private bed-
rooms and studies, but sharing refectories.

93

THE WORLD IN 203O

libraries, music-rooms, lounges, nurseries and
kitchens. The management of these synthesised
homes may be undertaken by the large number
of women who adorn every generation and
who, to the eternal benefit of their friends
and relations, find their greatest happiness
in discharging the duties of housekeeper or
nurse.

I do not believe that any amount of organised
education can turn such women from domestic
occupations and cares. And though the part
they play in the life of 2030 may be less spec-
tacular and dazzling than that of their more
intellectually acute sisters, their honour and
fame may be as high. A few years ago a
noticeable body of opinion deprecated the woman
who was content to rule her household, inspire
and comfort her husband, and bring up her
children in fine traditions. That mood is
passing; in the future such women will be
increasingly honoured, though in every station
of life, families will five more in public, less
at home. Indeed by 2030 home life as we
understand it may have become the quaint

94

EVERYDAY LIFE IN 2030

privilege of honeymoon couples, and of old folk
whose work in the world is accomplished.

Concerning the externals of hfe in 2030, I
must confess to a certain indifference, though
perhaps some forecast cannot be omitted here.
In such departments as dress, for example,
I can believe that radical and, to our eyes,
startling changes will occur. Women by casting
away their trailing draperies and figure-
distorting corsets have, in the last decade,
gained enormously in health, vitahty and
beauty. Unless men wish to be left behind
the opposite sex in physical and mental fitness,
it is plain that they must follow women's
example, and rid themselves of their present
fashions, which, convenient though they are,
are unhealthy in that they constrict the neck,
forbid the tonic properties of sunlight reaching
the body, are too heavy, and, in regard to the
external garments, collect dirt.

Similarly taste in amusements, decoration,
literature, music and all the other arts will
make many revolutions before 2030, if we may
judge by the example of previous centuries.

95

THE WORLD IN 203O

To trace the probable future development of
such matters as taste, is an unprofitable specu-
lation. The idiosyncrasy of one outstanding
genius may modify a branch of the arts for a
century in a purely arbitrary manner. Samuel
Johnson ruled English letters for a generation ;
Louis XIV imposed the canons of French
" classic " architecture on the rest of Europe
until his great -great -grandson’s head fell to the
guillotine ; Ruskin, by magnificently persuasive
rhetoric allied with a mediocre taste, passed
off a galaxy of third rate pictures and fifth rate
architecture on the supremely gullible Victorian
public as supreme works of genius, In the
process he nearly ruined Oxford. Another
Johnson, now struggling with syntax at his pre-
paratory school, may rise to dominate written
English ; a dictator among architects may
denounce and destroy the skyscraper ; a new
Ruskin may send our grandchildren into ecstasies
over a Lord Leighton yet unborn.

Yet, I believe that, a century hence, our
descendants will move in a clarified mental
atmosphere, as bracing as the Swiss air of

96

EVERYDAY LIFE IN 203O

midwinter. They will be able to view circum-
stances in a sharp outline* untroubled by hazes
and shadows. But like the mountain air, the
atmosphere will be cold as well as tonic. It
wiU be less genial, less charitable, less mellow
than the autumn air which has now superseded
the romantic fogs of the nineteenth century.
A dispassionate lust for scientific inquiry, an
impersonal taste for realities, will surely typify
their attitude towards life.

We, at present, are escaping from the most
personal and subjective era in the world’s
history ; an age when personality has been
glorified and exalted above aU else. I believe
that by reaction, and through the ever-growing
importance of scientific method and results,
the declining years of the twentieth century
will be distinguished by an insistence on
the objective in aU departments of human
activity.

Thus by 2030 men and women wiU seem,
judged by our standards, harsh and unemotional.
They wiU have recaptured and transformed into
new fashions, the precision, lucid sense and

0

97

THE WORLD IN 203O

keen criticism which distinguished the small
educated world of the eighteenth century. Wit
rather than humour, comedy rather than farce,
reason rather than sentiment, polish rather than
naivete, ingenuity rather than ingenuousness
will be valued.

So intimately is the history of civilisation
bound up with the expression of gigantic person-
alities, that a single individual may arise in
Europe or America to reshape the mould of
life before 2030. Another and a greater Wesley
may call back our grandchildren to fervent
emotional Pantheism, and recall the religious
wars which racked the seventeenth century.
A new and delicious Helen, inflaming the labora-
tories, may launch a thousand airships and
bring to ruin New York’s topless towers. A
Puritan revulsion may sweep over us, quenching
the arts and reconstituting the taboos of the
nineteenth century. A mad dictator, jealous
of Western progress, may precipitate a war,
which will finally burn up and destroy Western
civilisation, so that coming generations in China
and New Zealand will know it for no more than

98

EVERYDAY LIFE IN 203O

a memory and a name. But against this peril
I pin my faith upon the genius of the Anglo-
Saxon race.

99

THE AMENITIES OF 2030

T AMENTATIONS at the degeneracy of the

J j present, compared with the past, have

long been among our favourite amusements.
The earliest historical records contain forebodings
of the future, and prophecies of the inevitable
ruin which must overtake frivolous sons and
daughters unworthy of their ancestors, Jeremiah
and Savonarola ; the monkish authors of the
Anglo-Saxon chronicle, the late Lord Chaplin ;
Seneca, and Dean Inge — all these most varied
seers have warned their contemporaries of the
wrath that is to come, not without a certain
malicious relish.

It may also be observed with as much truth as
any generalisation contains, that these prophets
of disaster have seized upon the amenities
enjoyed by their fellows as evidence of racial
decay. " Soft raiment,” works of fiction, the
waltz, cocktails, cigarettes and votes for young

lOO

THE AMENITIES OF 203O

women have all provided the foundation of
arguments irrefutably demonstrating that morals
were dead, good manners a memory : and that
civilisation was rushing headlong to a Gadarene
catastrophe.

Actually these arguments have been fallacious.
The amenities of civilised life are not in them-
selves either noxious or benign. Their
popularity, spread generally by fashion, is as
evanescent as it is misleading to the social
observer anxious to discover the trend of a
nation’s progress.'

It would be, for example, in direct contra-
diction to the truth to deduce from the present
popularity of cocktails that this country shivered
on the brink of such another epidemic of
drunkenness as followed the introduction of cheap
gin in the eighteenth century. It is true that
what I believe is called " the cocktail habit "
forms a social ritual among young people of
substance to-day. Very possibly some of these
young people consume more spirituous con-
coctions than are either proper or beneficial ;
but the police statistics for the last half-century

lOI

THE WORLD IN 2030

prove that drunkenness is rapidly dying in
this country. The world has never been so
sober as it is to-day.

In considering, therefore, what amenities our
descendants may reasonably be expected to
enjoy in 3030, it should be remembered that
added facilities for enjoyment do not of them-
selves mean debauched lives or a passion for
pleasure-seeking. Our fathers were not better
men than we because their amenities were less
comprehensive than ours : our grandchildren
will not be worse than we because they are
offered avenues of enjoyment not as yet
developed.

I believe that the physical and social amenities
of life will enormously increase before 2030.
I am aware that this view is challenged by
thousands who lament the passing of " the
good old days,'.’ and hold that the possibilities
of leading a happy life decrease each year ; but
I can scarcely understand, far less support, so
ridiculous an argument. The average standard
of comfort, urbanity and means of recreation,
has tremendously advanced during the past

102

THE AMENITIES OF 2030

century. It has even noticeably increased since
the end of the war in 1918.

A century ago Beau Brummel, that neglected
social reformer, had only just persuaded London's
polite society that certain congruities of dark
cloth and spotless linen were preferable to the
greasy satins, tarnished gold embroidery and
frowsy ruffles in which the grandees of
the eighteenth century passed their convivial
lives.

Bruramel re-discovered personal cleanliness.
It began as his fad, and was regarded by his
fellows as a singular eccentricity. , To-day it
has become a social necessity. It is, moreover,
one of the first amenities ; and I believe that
the future will lay even more emphasis upon
it than the present.

By 2030 dirt will have disappeared from the
ordinary man’s experience. Chimneys, blight-
ing vegetation and poisoning the atmosphere
with their acrid fumes, will be banished from
industry. The machine shop, the foundry and
the abattoir of 2030 wiU be as clean as any
bakehouse or dispensary of 1930. Mr. Henry

103

THE WORLD IN 203O

Ford has already proved, in his immense motor-
car factory at Detroit, that dirt is uneconomic,
and has installed extensive machinery to make
and keep these works clean. He did so originally
because he valued his workers’ cleanliness for
its own sake. But before this machinery had
long been installed he discovered that cleanliness
was a paying proposition ; his new system was
saving money as well as adding to his staff’s
amenities.

Organised industry will quickly follow Mr,
Ford’s lead ; and the dirt at present associated
with machinery will seem a strange and hideous
fancy to the mind of 2030.

With dirt will disappear much of the hideous
noise which is so distressing a concomitant of
modern urban existence. Noise can only be
created by the expenditure of energy ; only
one-thousandth part of the noise of modern
London serves any useful purpose or provides
measurable enjoyment. The rest represents sheer
waste of effort and efficiency. The first motor-
cars were uproariously noisy. Their descendants
run with scarcely a sound. As they have become

THE AMENITIES OF 203O

efficient, so motor-cars have become silent. In
the same way all other machines will grow silent.
By 2030 the streets, though they be four times
as thronged as in 1930, will be disturbed only
by the sounds made by the human beings moving
in them. This silence will be shared by the
boiler-shop, the shipyard and the printing-works
— by every industrial unit which now deafens
the men it employs. Presuming that our
descendants will enjoy themselves as well as work
in this clean and quiet world, will they have
abandoned our own sports and amusements
for purely intellectual pleasures ? Will they
regard hunting, shooting and fishing as we do
the cock-fights and bear-baiting so popular
among our ancestors ?

Neither of these questions need be answered
in the affirmative. So far as recreations are
concerned, the young people of 2030 will amuse
themselves very much as young people do to-
day. But it may reasonably be anticipated
that the increase of wealth and prosperity, which
win have accrued by that date, will enable
the poorest to enjoy even expensive sports as

P 105

THE WORLD IN 203O

a participant, and not merely as a spectator.
Everyone will be sufficiently well off to play
football, cricket or tennis in comfort and to his
heart’s content ; and the decentralisation of
towns (to which I have referred in an earlier
paper) will provide him or her with easy access
to a choice of playing-fields.

Nor do I believe that horse-racing as a sport
need be any less popular in 2030 than it is
to-day. It is a diversion which appeals to men
and women of every conceivable degree of ability
and intelligence. There is a tendency to-day
among intellectuals to despise the racecourse as
the scene of the stupid man’s amusement, Such
scorn is as unmerited as it is harmless. Charles
II, Charles James Fox, Lord Russell of Killowen,
the late Lord Rosebery, Lord Beaverbrook —
this is not a catalogue of fools, but of men of
peculiar ability, each of whom has found in
horse-racing a pleasure and a relaxation from
more weighty concerns which nothing else could
afford him.

So long as horse-racing — with Hyde Park
perhaps as a very popular course — survives,

THE AMENITIES OF 203O

fox-hunting will not die. Both sports are
continually attacked, the one as the root of the
gambling evU, the other as a wanton cruelty.
I believe that the critics of both will fail in their
campaign to exterminate them. If horse-races
did not afford the gambler a convenient oppor-
tunity for hazardous speculation, he would
instantly devise another means of wasting his
money. If the enemies of fox-hunting cajole
some future government into making the sport
illegal, they must logically commence an agitation
for making all men vegetarians by Act of
Parliament.

I believe that neither of these sports will
die, but rather that both will become greatly
popularised. As wealth increases, we shall all he
able to ride to hounds. By 2030 the owner of
the Grand National winner may be the National
Union of Airplane Workers or the Timbuctoo
Co-operative Society, while the Master of the
Quorn may spend his working hours as a machine
tool designer or a ship steward.

In fact, by 2030, everyone will be able to
share the amenities which to-day can only be

107

THE WORLD IN 2030

commanded by a substantial income. The best
seats in theatres, more elegant and convenient
than any planned to-day ; foreign travel ; a
library of well-printed books ; a pleasant and
varied wardrobe; will be the portion of the
employed no less than of the employer.

Every material comfort and convenience which
the abolition of poverty can bring in its train
will smooth the career of the child born in the
next century. Some of the amenities we now
value, he will not experience. They will have
disappeared, killed by fashion, prejudice, or the
decrees of scientists. By way of compensation,
he wiU certainly be surrounded by pleasant
possibilities which we now can only imagine.

The clothes of 2030, for example, will be a
vast improvement on our present garments.
The possibilities of artificial silk are now
beginning to be understood. In the future,
materials of the artificial silk variety wiU be the
basis from which all clothing is made. Its
cheapness, lightness and warmth, fortified with
an added durability, will make it possible for
everyone to possess as many and as varied

108

THE AMENITIES OF 2030

garments as he — or, more particularly, she —
may desire.

It would be highly rash to speculate
concerning the fashions of the year 2030. If
we consider the evolution of clothes since the
end of the last century, we may obtain some
idea in what direction that evolution is likely
to continue.

The emergence of women from the com-
parative seclusion of domesticity and the
universal adoption of an active and locomotive
mode of life, have revolutionised dress in a very
short space of years. For centuries civUised
women in western Europe swathed, compressed
and swaddled their bodies in an amazing variety
of draperies and miUinery. So long as she
led a life bounded by domestic and maternal
cares, these strange garments did not hamper
her career. So soon, however, as she emerged
to compete with men in industry, business and
sport, woman discovered that her clothes placed
her under a grave handicap. The fashions
changed drastically and immediately ; she
adopted the knee-length kilt in place of the

109

THE WOELD IN 203O

long clinging skirt, free airy garments in place of
creaking whalebone moulds. As woman is now
clad, her garments offer the least possible
hindrance to her energy.

It is significant that since this break with the
tradition of centuries, completed about a decade
ago, woman’s dress has remained practically
uniform in fashion. Minor changes, of course,
occur every few months ; how else could the
great army of workers who live on fashion
survive ? But despite the most determined
efforts of fashion designers, woman will not
materially modify her raiment, except in the
evening when her work is ended and she feels
at liberty to become purely ornamental,

This revolution in woman’s dress must in
the future react on men’s attire. At present
men are suitably dressed for the functions they
fulfil, only when they play games. The flannels
of the tennis player, the shorts and jersey of the
footballer, the tweeds of the deerstalker are
all fitted to the needs of the wearer. But the
inconvenience of the clothes in which men direct
great industrial enterprise, negotiate treaties.

no

THE AMENITIES OF 2030

or sit in Parliaments to govern (or serve) their
fellows, is farcical.

Men’s dress, on formal occasions, has scarcely
changed since the respectable opulence of mid-
Victorian convention established broadcloth,
frock-coats, starched linen and top hats. This
uniform may possibly be dignified. It is
certainly neither hygienic nor comfortable.
Very soon, I believe, men will revolt against
it, and establish a new convention of what
may be worn without attracting attention or
justifying derision.

I do not contemplate a descent to sloppiness
in male fashions. Byronic looseness and
Bohemian untidiness can have no place in an
age which, even more than our own, will bring
everybody in close contact with powerful and
swiftly moving machinery. But the excessive
complications of men’s present clothes will dis-
appear. At present, in dressing, the average
male deals with forty-odd buttons ; in order to
appear appropriately dressed on ordinary
occasions, it is necessary for him to possess
at least half-a-dozen different costumes. Not

111

THE WORLD IN 2030

long ago, in order to carry out a busy day’s
programme, the Prince of Wales changed his
clothes a dozen times between waking and
returning to bed. This is an extreme instance of
the demands which sartorial convention places
upon an extremely busy man. It proves how
essential it is that men’s clothes shall be
simplified.

By 2030 two or three simple costumes will
have been devised for men — one for formal
occasions, one for all workaday purposes,
and the last for recreation. Each will be as
rational, as well-suited to its purpose, and as
healthy as the clothes which women wear to-day.
Thus simply clad, the man of 2030 will set off
for the week-end, after his work, in a small,
swift airplane, as reliable and cheap as the
motor-cars on which we depend to-day. Since
speeds of at least 300 to 400 miles an hour
will be within the machines’ range, half the
world will be within the compass of a Saturday
to Monday excursion.

To cater for such travellers new pleasure
resorts will spring up in previously inaccessible

II2

THE AMENITIES OF 2030

regions, distinguished for their natural beauties
or their congenial climate. The winter sports
of Labrador or the Hudson Bay Territories will
empty Montreal and New York each week-end
until high summer. Ski-ing parties in Green-
land will be made up in London clubs on
Saturday mornings, and translated into action
before the same evening.

The most interesting possibility, however, is
the creation of a new playground for all Europe
in Northern Africa. A vast region in what is
now the Sahara desert forms a natural basin,
lying ’’well below the level of the Mediterranean
Sea. By cutting a canal from the Mediterranean
to this area, a new inland sea must surely be
created. Its shores, now barren, would rival
Florida for fertile charm ; its climate would
realise all the paragraphs written of the coast of
southern France by pubhcity experts. During
the summer this new Riviera might well be
too hot to be pleasant ; but from October
until May ths climate will be ideal for holiday
makers.

Along the shores of such a sea will arise new

THE WORLD IN 203O

towns of hotels and villas, theatres and race-
courses — pleasure cities within the reach of every
European capital, attracting a swarm of airplanes
each week-end. Possibly this scheme may
not have been completely realised by 2030 ;
but I believe that the prospect of transforming
a barren desert into a prosperous region will
certainly have induced some group of enter-
piising financiers to explore the idea, and its
prospects.

To those who choose to stay at home, rather
than depart by air for a remote resort, 2030 will
offer attractions far in advance of anything
possible to-day. The development of broad-
casting and television will enable a family,
gathered round its own atomically radiant hearth,
to watch and listen to a variety of spectacles.
On a screen let into the wall of the room where
they are gathered, plays will be projected stereo-
scopically in full natural colours. From a
concealed loud speaker the voices of the actors
will emerge as from their owners' mouths — not,
like the “ talkies ” of to-day, as if muttered
through a lamp-glass darkly. It will be possible

THE AMENITIES OF 2030

to create in a private house the exact illusion
of physical presence at a stage performance
hundreds of miles away.

By this means everyone will be enabled to
assist at performances by the most gifted actors
and actresses of the day. Any piece can be
revived “ for one night only ” at a moment’s
notice. In this case, a perfect talking film
recorded on a previous occasion wiU be sent out
through the transmitting apparatus.

I do not believe, however, that this perfec-
tion of engineering ingenuity wiU prevent
packed audiences from gathering to attend
the performances of superlative artistes. The
atmosphere of a crowded theatre or concert-
hall possesses an attraction which can never
be reproduced in a private house where only two
or three are gathered. The mass emotion of
a first night at the Metropolitan Opera House
in New York, or at Co vent Garden in London,
or at La Scala in Milan — so easy to recall and
so difficult to define — adds enormously to the
prestige and excitement of the occasion. So
long as human nature remains unchanged, it

THE WORED IN 203O

will always be preferable to be present at such
scenes rather than to watch a perfect simulation
of them in one’s own home.

Fundamentally, however, the whole question
of the amenities of life is intimately connected
with locality and tradition. The great country
houses of eighteenth century England produced
a pleasant existence for their occupants, distinct
in flavour and unique in breadth of interest.
The slave-supported cotton-growing Southern
States, before the American Civil War, elaborated
a social routine and a variety of pleasures
peculiar to themselves. The amenities of each
of these microcosms were indigenous and not
to be transplanted. The fusion of sport and
culture at Houghton, Castle Howard or Stowe
could only exist in its own familiar Palladian
setting. The gracious indolence of the Carolinas
withered into stagnation the day the slaves
were freed.

Similarly the civilisation of speed, science
and machines into which our descendants of
2030 will be born must certainly develop charac-
teristic amenities and pleasures. To-day we are

THE AMENITIES OF 203O

watching the death of a society and a tradition
which have existed since the first French
Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. That
society was founded on an unconscious alliance
between the eighteenth-century oligarchic families
with the new wealth created by the application
of power to industry. It flowered brilliantly
during the last Victorian decades ; it questioned
its own authority and doubted its own prestige
during the Edwardian years. The war killed it.

Nothing permanent or promising has yet risen
in its place. It seems certain that industry,
organised on a vast and even more international
scale, will control the power of the world, during
the present century. But it is not yet discernible
how the controllers of this industry will mould
society.

The amenities of 2030 must ultimately depend
upon the course of political and economic history
during the intervening century. If these years
are filled with anxieties and upheavals, the
amenities of life in 2030 will be crude and vulgar.
Periods of unrest may produce great men and
great literature ; but they do not induce a

THE WORLD IN 2030

gracious social convention or a tradition of
fine manners and liiglily developed living. The
Imperial court of Napoleon was more vital and
real than the tottering splendours of Louis
XVI’s Versailles ; hut it was in a comparison
awkward, stupid and pretentious.

If the next century is tranquil and prosperous,
life in 2030 will be adorned by cultured and
urbane amenities in excess of the pleasant acexun-
paniments which our contemporary civilisiition
can exhibit. If, on the contrary, the twcntudli
century is confused by strife between one order
in the State and another, 2030 would find
London as barren of real amenities as when
Cromwell signed Charles I’s death-warrant, or
Henry VII rode to London from Bosworth
Field. The tranquillity and the amenities would
not exceed those of modern Leningrad.

1x8

THE AIR IN 2030.

THE AIR IN 2030

M an has only very recently taken to the
air as a navigator. Such spectacular
and resounding results are annually wrung from
aviation, that we forget how incomplete is our
understanding, how insecure our conquest, and
how flimsy our achievements.

Although, since the War, the airplane has
become a commonplace of every existence, save
that passed in extravagant retirement, it should
not be imagined that this necessarily indicates
the dawn of a genuine " air-age,” in which the
sky will grow dark with wings, and those motor-
car manufacturers who have not the sense to
forestall the change will be driven out of
business.

Our conquest of the air has, so far, been no
more than partial and desultory. Its efforts
towards success have resembled the brushes
of guerrilla warfare rather than an organised

119

THE WORLD IN 2030

campaign conducted by disciplined forces under
scientific leadership. Progress has been forced
upon us in the stern school of war, or else
inspired by some happy fluke.

Little more than twenty-five yeax's ago the
Wright brothers achieved the first flight in a
power-driven heavier-than-air flying machine,
an " aerodyne.” Quite recently a bxuiquet
was held to commemorate the twentieth anni-
versary of the morning whcix Louis B16riot
astounded the world by rising into the air near
Cap Gris-Nez in France, aixd descending on the
cliffs of Dover.

Before we can look for an answer to the
question, " What will the airplane be like in
2030 A.D, ? ” we must first, therefore, discover
whether these singular machines of wires, struts,
wood, canvas and ” dope ” are capable of
serious improvement at all. May it not be that
airplanes have now I'eached the stage of develop-
ment similar to that at which the locomotive
railway engine arrived some sixty years ago,
and in which it has ever since stagnated ? It is
true that the machines which haul the great

THE AIR IN 2030

express trains of the world look infinitely more
imposing than the humble engine of 1869. The
modern engine is actually more powerful as
well as larger ; it embodies a vast number of
small and important improvements of design
and manufacture. But it is only the logical
development of its earlier sister. It contains
the fruit of no single mechanical idea of
importance, which the earlier engine did not
contain.

Already railway engineers can estimate the
limits of performance which can possibly be
wrung from steam locomotives of the normal
design in existing conditions. They can tell
exactly what is possible in the future — and
what is impossible. Is the same true of the
airplane ?

This may weU be. Although flying, as I have
reminded my readers, still remains in its
infancy ; although aerial research has vast
regions to explore, at present utterly unknown;
yet the limits of the airplane's achievements
in the future can already be roughly deter-
mined, because the future developments of the

R I2I

THE WORLD IN 203O

reciprocating explosion motor, driven by petrol,
is already fairly well known.

On tills motor the airplane totally depends
for the defeat of gravity. Only by the regular
functioning of such a motor can the airplane
either remain in the air or be steered on a course.
In order to keep such a motor at its work, the
airplane must carry bulky and wi'ighty supplies
of suitable fuel for its consumption ; in conse-
quence, when it first rises into the air from
the ground, it is burdmicd with the maximum
load.

All these facts threaten the future develop-
ment of the airplane. The most that can he
hoped for, I therefore predict, must be regular
speeds in the neighbourhood of three hundred
miles an hour ; an extension of the “commerciar'
flight from its present length of 150 miles to 500
miles ; and the perfection of safe all-metal
machines up to about three limes the size of the
ordinary mnlti-cngined air-liner now used on the
London to Paris services.

Beyond these limits many cautious and sound
engineers cannot conceive that petrol-driven

isa

THE AIR IN 2030

airplanes will develop. All these improvements,
however, will, with certainty, have materialised
by the year 2030 ; and the organisation of
flying services for the transport of passengers,
mails, and urgent merchandise will have grown
to be a very large and paying industry. Regular
all-the-year-round services to India, the Cape
and Australia {via an Indian and Malayan route),
as well as daily airplanes for all Continental
capitals, will be the commonplaces of a breezier
and more intelligible Bradshaw. Concerning
an Atlantic air-ferry, however, I remain sceptical.
The thing could be accomplished either by means
of landing stations moored in mid-ocean ; or
else by following a trans-Arctic route. But
if it is ever to be regularly and popularly
achieved with the petrol-motor’s aid, I incline
to an Atlantic air-ferry operated by lighter-than-
air machines.

The airship has a host of caustic enemies ;
but, so long as explosion motors, needing large
supplies of weighty fuel, propel aircraft, it must
continue to play an important part in the
history of aerial travel. The airship has been

123

THE WORLD IN 2030

lately developed, from a technical point of
view, far more than is commonly suppovsed.

Guaranteed passengers, a weekly London-New
York ferry service of dirigihles, each carrying
100 passengers and a cargo of mails, is an
economic proposition at the jux'sent moment.
It is a project which, if a company were floated
to achieve it, could legitiniatcily apply to the
public for capital with every hope of paying a
regular and remunerative dividemd on its shares.

By 2030 many such airship compani('s will
be realities. Ikissibly some of the great
steamship lines may have the enterprise, to float
them, and thus retain their valuabk'. mail con-
tracts, as well as a share in the fame which must
attach itself to successful commercial pioneers
in such a sphere. I should like to see the
Cunard, the White vStar, the P. & 0 . — to name
only three great shipping companies -"go "into
the air ” at once, and institute exhaustive
experimental work towards estahlisliing a fleet
of airships to co-operate and supplement the
services maintained by their existing sea-ships.

I do not expect to be so gratified. Economic

X24

THE AIR IN 2030

history abundantly proves that those who have
profited from one mechanical invention do not
as a rule take kindly to its successor. The
sailing-ship owners deprecated steam — untd it
ruined them. The stage-coach companies alter-
nately laughed at the railway train, and
hysterically worked to prevent its capitalisation.
Only Mr. Henry Ford among prominent motor-
car manufacturers seems to perceive that it is
worth while laying down plant to build air-
planes, as distinct from airplane engines.

On the other hand the present mainstay of
the airplane, the petrol engine, may not prove
so irreplaceable as the engineers believe. If
the physicist comes to the rescue, as I have
suggested in an earlier paper, and accomplishes
the necessary researches, he may enable some
designer of genius to produce a motor running
on intra-molecular, or less probably on intra-
atomic, energy. When we may expect such a
motor as a commercial proposition, it would
be rash to prophesy. It is possible that it
may have arrived by the year 2030 ; since the
whole future of man as a flying creature depends

125

THE WORLD IN 2030

upon its arrival, I propose to sketch the complete
revolution which such a motor will produce in
the development of airplanes.

Primarily, the molecular-energy motor will
mean the defeat of gravity. Engines weighing
only a few ounces for each horse-power developed,
and capable of carrying fuel, sufficient for a
thousand hours’ continuous operation, in a tank
the size of a breakfast cup will be designed and
marketed. Equipped with such a motor, the
airplane will no longer be tied to the ground.
It will be able to remain in the air indefinitely,
without refuelling. Its ratio of useful load to
total weight will be enormously enlarged. Its
reliability will so increase that accidents caused
by engine failure can be ruled out of
consideration.

The result of the introduction of this motor
will be to inaugurate that “air age” which
enthusiasts have already several times welcomed
in an excess of optimistic fervour, Such
a motor will banish most traffic from the
face of the earth, and ships laden with
merchandise from the ocean. The raw materials

126

THE AIR IN 2030

of heavy industry, and the finished productions
of its processes, will always travel to and from
the factory by land and water ; it is plainly
not worth while dispatching them through the
air. But for every other purpose aerial
transport will become universal.

Since the molecular-energy motor will require
no oxygen for its operation, aircraft will no
longer be confined, as now it is, to the dense
layer of air immediately above the earth's sur-
face. 50,000 feet may well prove the average
level of flight of trans-Atlantic airplanes, whose
average speed through the thin, cold, clear
atmosphere which exists at such a height, will
be in the neighbourhood of a steady six hundred
miles an hour.

By means of such machines New York and
London wfll be brought within a few hours’
journey of each other. Leaving London after
breakfast, passengers will travel in hermetically
sealed, weh-heated cabins. There will, of course,
be no pleasure in looking out of the window,
for, above, one wiU see a monotonously blue
sky in which a cold sun for ever shines ; and

127

THE WORLD IN 203O

below, a level sea of cloud, white and dazzling
with reflected sunlight, and broken only by
distant glimpses of the grey waters of the
Atlantic, which, no matter how the wind lashes
them, will seem from such a height as unruffled
as a duck-pond.

Much has been said recently, and more
written, of the possibility of electrically pro-
pelled aircraft, which will gather their energy
from the ether as they fly. Mr. Marconi has lent
the great weight which, in such matters, properly
attaches to his name to certain of these specu-
lations. He has spoken prophetically of huge
land-stations broadcasting electrical energy to
be picked up by flying-machines, and used by
them for their propulsion.

I view these speculations with caution. Such
a thing may be possible in the future ; but I
doubt, for two good reasons, whether it will
ever be accomplished. First, because the
amount of energy which must necessarily be
" broadcast ” before even certain well-defined
air routes become sufficiently highly electrified
is stupendous. Secondly, because the electric

128

THE AIR IN 2030

motor, as we know it, although efficient, is
extremely heavy. The lightest motors at present
in existence are hve times as heavy, per horse-
power produced, as are present-day petrol air-
plane engines. This is because both soft iron
and copper enter largely into their construction,
and cannot be replaced by any other metals.

Of course it is possible that the world short-
age of copper which is already chronic and will
become acute by the end of the present century,
will drive scientists to evolve a substitute alloy,
If this proves much lighter than copper, a really
useful electric airplane motor may result. But
I do not feel sanguine concerning electrically
driven aircraft in any circumstances. The
molecular- energy motor provides, I beheve, by
far the most probable and desirable solution to
the problem.

There remains the possibility that the air-
craft of the future will be propelled by the simple
principle of reaction, like the rockets sent up
on the 4th of June at Eton. Great interest in
this form of propulsion has lately been shown
in Germany, where numerous experiments have

S 129

THE WORLD IN 203O

taken place with a " rocket-car " running on a
specially prepared railway track. So far this
vehicle, though it has achieved speeds consider-
ably in excess of a hundred miles an hour, has
not proved docile. It has run amuck more than
once, and slain a brave man who pinned his
faith on its capacity.

Yet it would be ridiculous and rash, because
this '' rocket-car ” has so far proved a tragic
farce, to conclude that the principle on which it
works is unsound and useless. On the contrary,
this principle may play an important part in the
future development of aviation. Long distance
aerodynes of the future, climbing into the air
and descending to earth vertically by means of
air-screws arranged as helicopters, may well
be propelled horizontally at enormous speeds
by the same propulsion which drives the
"rocket-car” on its crazy dash down the
railway track.

Instead of utilising molecular energy to turn
an airscrew the engineers of the future may
obtain better results by allowing a stream of this
energy to rush freely from the stern of their

130

THE AIR IN 2030

airships, and so to drive them forward through
the atmosphere. By adopting this means of
propulsion, moreover, they will be able to fly
at far greater altitudes above the Earth's surface
than would otherwise be possible. A propellent
airscrew needs a surrounding atmosphere of a
certain density for its efficient operation. A
hundred thousand feet above sea level, for
example, the air is too rarefied for its functions.
But, at such altitudes, the thin air offers only
slight resistance to the passage of bodies through
it at high speeds. Therefore it would make
both for speed and economy of working if the
great air hners of the future could habitually
cruise at such a height. Only the " rocket ”
functions with equal efficiency in an atmosphere
of any density.

This same system of propulsion must also be
used if ever a practical attempt is made in the
next century to reach the Moon or one of the
planets by means of a flying machine. Such an
expedition has long been the dream of scientists,
and a productive mainstay for the authors of
fiction. Many men believe that it will so remain.

131

THE WORLD IN 2030

But our descendants will certainly attempt
journeys to other members of the solar system.
An expedition to our own moon seems a cold
and unattractive proposition ; far less inviting
than a journey to Mars ; because, while astro-
nomers assure us that the Moon is certainly not
inhabited, it is possible that Mars supports
not only a luxurious flora, but also a fauna whose
most highly developed specimens may prove
an analogous order to the human species.

By 2030 the first preparations for the first
attempt to reach Mars may perhaps be under
consideration. The hardy individuals who form
the personnel of the expedition will be sent forth
in a machine propelled like a rocket ; and
equipped with a number of light masts which
can be quickly extended, like fishing rods, from
its nose. The purpose of these will be to break
the impact with which, granted all possible skill
and luck, the projectile would strike the surface
of the planet.

The great problem which such an expedition
will face, however, is the possibility of missing
Mars altogether ; and, having escaped from the

13a

THE AIR IN 2030

Earth’s gravitational field, of wandering aimlessly
through space unable to find a planet where they
can hope for asylum. Such a fate, indeed, may
well overtake the first half-dozen expeditions
which set out from the Earth to reach Mars.
But, one day, a few men may arrive alive on
the surface of our nearest neighbour in space.
It seems unlikely that they can long hope to
survive there, far less that they will be able
to return to their home on the Earth. The
most for which they can hope, will be to send
back across the ether a few messages of
information concerning Martian conditions; to
transmit the results of a dozen accurate
scientific observations before they perish. I
should not myself be a volunteer member of
that party.

The fruit of their messages, and of their death,
will be new expeditions, better equipped, better
prepared to withstand the physical difficulties
of life on another planet, and bearing with
them in their flying machines the materials to
erect another smaller machine on the surface
of Mars. Into this, bearing with them the records

133

THE WORLD IN 203O

of their experiments and observations, but
jettisoning the rest of their equipment and
apparatus, the survivors of the later expeditions
may retreat, and so hope to regain the Earth.

This outline of the exploration of Mars is
admittedly fantastic ; but can we be quite sure
that it is inconceivable ? It is typical of
the spirit in which the man of science goes to
work when he is faced by a difficult as weU as a
highly perilous adventure. In such circum-
stances he values his own life no more than an
ant. So long as the human race reaches the
goal towards which he strives to impel its
reluctant inertia, he cares little what happens
to his own life and fortunes. He is as altruistic
as the first Christian martyrs ; and, it may be
suggested without offence, his altruism is cal-
culated to secure even more substantial benefits
for his fellow-men. At all events we may be sure
that, when expeditions to Mars first become
dimly practicable, there will be devoted and
highly skilled men prepared to risk certain death
in the hope that, by so doing, they can add to
the total of human knowledge.

134

THE AIR IN 2030

When the air has become man’s’ universal
thoroughfare ; when the acceleration of flying
has brought London within a short journey of
New York; when each suburban home owns
its light airplane^ as now it can own a motor-
car ; what will be the effect of taking to the air
upon human affairs and relationships ?

I believe, practically nothing. Again and again
in the course of history it has been predicted
that this or that mechanical invention " must ”
end international misunderstandings, and in-
augurate an era of utter peace and prosperity.
The electric telegraph, the railway, the steam-
ship, wireless telegraphy, and — oddly enough —
the telephone, were all hailed as universal
pacificators. They have not noticeably fulfilled
their promise.

Makers of such predictions fail to remember
that European civilisation enjoyed through some
half-dozen centuries a common religion and a
common philosophy of life ; and that these bonds
signally failed to prevent wars, or even to
mitigate their bitterest horrors once they were
joined.

135

THE WORLD IN 2030

If such cogent bonds as these, affecting mind,
habits and body alike, could not bridle the
chronic pugnacity of nations, how shall we say
that the adoption of travel by air in place of
travel by land and sea will persuade where they
failed to coerce ?

The conquest of the air, instead of pacifying
humanity, will place a new and terrible weapon
in the hands of the bellicose.

As I have pointed out in a previous chapter,
I do not believe that organised warfare in the
future will grow more, but rather less, horrible
both for combatant and civilian. But when the
forces of a nation have failed in the field, when
the last hope of a War Cabinet has been launched,
and that hope has failed against the armaments
of the enemy, the conquest of the air will place
a new temptation in the hearts of bitter and
despairing men. It will enable the beaten nation,
just before treating for an armistice, to obtain,
if not victory, at least revenge, As a last gesture
the vanquished can launch a secret armada of
the air, to rain death and plague from the
heavens upon the sleeping cities of the conquerors.

136

THE AIR IN 2030

Such an act would make the peace terms im-
posed on them twice as onerous ; it would be the
cynical denial of every principle of honour and
decency in warfare ; it would shock the con-
science of the world.

The world has received such shocks in the
past ; it will receive them in the future.

There is a mood of desperate hate which over-
takes not only individuals, but nations and their
governments ; a mood in which the vanquished
counts no cost, envisages no reparations or
reprisals, so long as he can cripple his victor
before he goes down in defeat.

Many a future war — and there will be
future wars — may terminate in such senseless
holocausts.

The pious optimist will denounce this
suggestion as irrational and ludicrous, as
something which cannot possibly materialise.
It will materialise. It is the price that man
will pay for his ultimate conquest of the air.

T

137

WORLD POLITY IN 2030

W ORLD polity to-day is conditioned by
the conception of nationality. In world
affairs we think instinctively in terms of nations ;
critical events turn on the susceptibilities of
national pride or on the pressure of national
advantage ; a certain co-operation in regard
to the specific details of life is as far as a prudent
realist in politics will go towards envisaging a
universal and harmonious union.

Nationality is old as an idea, but extremely
modern in its concrete realisation. The ancient
world did not know it ; Rome ignored it ;
mediaeval civilisation fought against it as a
pernicious and subversive social heresy. Yet it
arrived ; and established itself in Europe,
championed by such diverse creatures of genius
as Joan of Arc, King Henry V of England, Martin
Luther, Shakespeare, Louis XIV, Cavour and
Garibaldi. France, though hindered by many

138

THE WORLD POLITY IN 2030.

WORLD POLITY IN 2030

and grave internal difficulties, first crystallised
the idea in a clear intellectual concept. Through
successive and generally victorious wars her
rulers so impressed this idea upon each French-
man, that France still remains the pattern
" nation ” of the world. From the point of view
of foreign Powers who wish to arrive at an accom-
modation with her, she is endowed with an
over-developed sense of nationality. Every
Frenchman is not only conscious, he is self-
conscious, perhaps over-conscious, of his
nationality, Fie bristles with it.

The last century was obsessed by this idea
of nationality. The poets, philosophers and
statesmen of the nineteenth century distilled
into this conception all the moral earnestness
of their age. It became a shibboleth with them
that every agglomeration of human beings,
however irresponsible, however insignificant,
which could claim its descent from a stock
distinguishable from that of its neighbours’
ancestors possessed ipso facto a sacred and
inalienable right to autonomy.

Sometimes, of course, to the confusion of this

139

THE WORLD IN 203O

theory, it was discovered by anthropologists
that the peoples which most desired national
“ freedom ” were of extremely hybrid descent ;
ol that the same blood flowed in their veins as
in those of the neighbours whom they mo’st
sincerely detested. Italy as a whole is popu-
lated by no single distinct race ; yet when the
careful propaganda of Cavour aroused an intense
desire for Italian unity and autocracy — under
the dominion of the House of Savoy — apostles of
nationality conveniently ignored any fact which
conflicted with their theory, and shouted ever
more loudly in praise of the Risorgimento.

During the last decade of the nineteenth
century, doubts concerning the infallibility of
this conception of nationality — at least, so far
as practical politics went — began to arise in the
minds of various competent observers. The cen-
tury had opened in an atmosphere of hope and
strenuous effort. It seemed to the very foolish
Liberals of 1825 that democracy must sweep all
before it and solve every human problem and
evil. It seemed, too, after the fall of Napoleon,
that war on a large scale could never again dis-

140

WORLD POLITY IN 203O

tract the West ; and that steam, muscular
Christianity, the factory system, and Liberal
doctrine, would sw'iftly and harmoniously civilise
the Orient.

The century drew to a grey and doubtful
close. Not even the solid prosperity of Europe,
the glamour of Queen Victoria’s Jubilees, and
the establishment of Parliamentary government
in even the most unlikely capitals disguised
the fact that national autonomy and democracy
were not the panaceas which the world had
assumed. The nations of Europe, by theory
supposed to grow in beauty side by side, com-
plementary in virtues and native excellences,
found themselves ranged in two armed camps.
Great Britain, traditionally aloof from continental
entanglements, was forced, as always in history,
by the pressure of menaces to join one of the
opposed organisations. On ceremonial occasions
pohticians, sometimes dishonest, sometimes only
foolish, continued to praise freedom, to extol
the idea of nationality ; but, even as they spoke,
they should have known that this very idea
had involved a continent in a situation which

THE WORLD IN 203O

only the explosion of a violent military catas-
trophe could dissolve.

How that catastrophe came, and what course
it followed, we know too well. After hostilities
had ceased, the statesmen of the victorious
allies met in Paris to formulate the terms they
intended to impose upon a defeated Germany.
Unfortunately the moral ascendancy on this
occasion fell into the hands of a man utterly
obsessed by the idea of nationality. It would
be idle to doubt the good will, the integrity, or
the high ideals of the late President Woodrow
Wilson. But it is as certain as anything can be
that his obsolescent beliefs have brought an
unmitigated disaster to Europe, and in their
reaction, to the whole world.

Conformably with his precepts a number of
new states was set up in Europe. Republics,
each bitterly jealous of their neighbours, were
carved from the Impotent bodies of the broken
and vanquished, and by a stroke of the pen
transformed into independent, self-governing and
responsible states. In many cases, it may be
noted in passing, the borders of these states

14*

WORLD POLITY IN 203O

were determined by anything rather than by
a dispassionate investigation of the ” natural
frontiers ” determined by language or race. The
result of this obsession with the " rights of
subject nations ” at Versailles is to-day only too
apparent. To maintain her military ascendancy
in Europe, France has necessarily engaged
herself in a network of mihtary alliances with
the new Powers of Central Europe, with the
result that an atmosphere of mutual suspicion
stiU complicates European relationships. There
are so many powers, so many pacts, so many
secret and semi-secret agreements that even
professional diplomats, educated to thread such
mazes, scarcely know where they stand from
one day to the next. The chronic ailments
which paralysed diplomacy before the War have
recurred in aggravated form.

To a superficial observer, the pre-war state of
Central Europe, dominated by Imperial Germany
and the Dual Monarchy, though it contained
many an oppression and many an injustice, may
well seem preferable to the present maelstrom
of suspicious bickering. Then there was at least

143

THE WORLD IN 2030

calm, — though it proved to he only the calm
before the storm of storms.

This problem of Nationality is the most im-
portant with which the statesman of the future
must deal. By the year 2030 he will have solved
it satisfactorily ; or it will have destroyed our
present system of civilisation. For nationality,
as exemplified on the Continent of Europe, lives
and draws its nourishment from such expensive
and destructive agencies as competitive arma-
ment, commercial jealousy, prohibitive tariff
walls, and international incidents. It is the
negation of calm reasonableness and suspended
judgment. Emotionalism, hysteria and jingoism
are its favourite food ; an overweening pride
its habitual mood ; a noisy self-satisfaction its
mode of expression.

It has been abundantly plain for many years to
every analytic mind that the British Empire and
this narrow conception of nationality are utterly
incompatible. King George V reigns over sub-
jects of a hundred races and almost as many
creeds. As equal citizens of his Empire, Saxon >
Celt, Semite, Mohammedan, Hindu, Chinaman

144

WORLD POLITY IN 203O

and Maori share similar rights and are subject to
identical responsibilities ; the rehgion and the
racial prejudices of each one are guarded by an
impartial law. As citizens of this Empire, each
man, Christian, Mohammedan, Jew, Hindu, or
Confucian, whether his skin be white, brown,
black or yellow, is united by a vague general
loyalty which sublimates his local and racial
loyalties ; which transcends his smaller attach-
ments.

Cynics may maintain that this loyalty is lip-
service ; and adduce, to support their thesis,
the breakaway of Southern Ireland from direct
Enghsh rule, and the movement towards complete
secession among the Dutch population of South
Africa. I believe that these movements, and
such others as resemble them, are the last
flames flickering up from the dying embers of
'* nationalism '' as that word was understood in
the nineteenth century. I am persuaded that
the best opinion in the Free State will work for
an increasingly close co-operation with the home
government at Westminster ; and that the party
which General Hertzog ably if sometimes fit-

V

145

THE WORLD IN 2030

fully leads will orientate its policy and modify
its aims as the memory of the past, or rather
its legend, dies away.

After all, the conception of an imperial loyalty,
transcending local and racial loyalties, is no
new idea to the world. For centuries the Pax
Romana embraced the whole civilisation which
centred round that inland sea, the Mediterranean.
The Roman Empire, however, stood and fell
with Rome. The city was the only heart of
the empire. From Rome came the inspiration,
the sanction and the energy which made even
the remotest outposts, held by the legions,
function and survive.

In the case of the British Empire this is not so.
As I have suggested in a previous chapter,
economic and political pressure may make it
imperative that the heart of this Empire should
migrate from London to Canada or even to
Australia at some date in the next century or
in the ages which are to follow. The integrity
of the Empire will survive this transplantation
without shock or disaster. As a partnership
of free and equal peoples it possesses a vitality

146

WORLD POLITY IN 203O

and elasticity which Rome could never achieve.
We can alter our institutions and constitution
to meet the changing needs of any age. Rome,
cast in a mould of classic but immobile
practicality, changed at her peril.

Because the constitution of the British Empire
is the most utilitarian and practical form of
government so far evolved by human ingenuity,
it would seem that similar commonwealths of
nations may be evolved in the future. It
requires no vast imagination, for example, to
envisage a fusion between the Spanish-speaking
and Portuguese-speaking republics of South
America to form a single confederated common-
wealth. Central America and Mexico aheady lie
under the shadow of the United States’ authority.
These regions may not be able to resist much
longer the benefits and advantages of at least a
partial fusion with their great neighbour.

To the north of the United States lies Canada ;
an intensely individualist nation, which would
oppose to the death any proposal for union with
the States. As national feeling and sentiment
now prevail, it seems unthinkable that Canada

147

THE WORLD IN 203O

and the United States can ever become a part
of the same comity of peoples. Perhaps in the
distant future the two branches of the English-
speaking peoples will be -driven into each other’s
arms, and forced by world circumstances into
more than an alliance of close mutual co-operation
in all international questions. Concerning such
a union it would be rash to prophesy. But I am
not without hope that circumstances may one
day undo, in spirit if not in form, the breach
caused by the obstinate stupidity of George III
and the indolent subservience of Lord North.

To-day any confederation between the states
of Europe appears remote. Jealousies and
suspicions rather than a wish for mutual co-
operation distinguish their relationships. Yet'
there are forces moulding the future of the world
which may, before the end of the twenty-first
century, drive these states to forget their
differences and to combine in the face of a
common and almost incalculable danger.

This danger may come out of Asia. One baby
in every four born into the world looks up into
the eyes of a Chinese mother. China, now

M8

WORLD POLITY IN 203O

involved in a hopeless ferment of filibustering
war-lords and new ideas, seems helpless and
distracted — as involved in internal dissensions as
Germany when she was still split into a hundred
and one petty principalities. A handful of
determined men under Bismarck, and two short
wars, sufficed to transform this supine con-
glomeration into' the most formidable military
organisation that the world has ever known. A
similar transformation is by no means impossible
in China.

It is idle to argue that the Chinese intellect
and character make such a transformation im-
possible. The ideas wliich Europe discards
travel Eastwards — ex Occidente tenebrcB — and,
taking root in fertile soil, produce there a crop
of monstrous fruit. A stream of eager Chinese
youths, half-educated by missionaries, invades
Europe and America each year ; avid to absorb
all the clap-trap philosophy purveyed by half-
baked intellects. These youths return to their
homes infected with the poisons of "Western
civilisation, apostles of every dangerous and
subversive creed.

149

THE WORLD IN 303O

Nor is it profitable to delude ourselves by
underestimating the practical genius of the
Chinese. Those men were able administrators,
expert organisers and sagacious men of business,
who maintained the complicated machinery of
the former Chinese Empire, who governed the
largest single nation in the world, and who,
in antiquity, undertook such feats as the con-
struction of the Great Wall of China. The same
practical qualities which distinguished their for-
bears animate a part at least of the Chinamen of
to-day. In business they far outstrip their more
obviously agile competitors, the Japanese ; in
laborious attention to detail, they challenge the
German ; in sheer powers of endurance, they
surpass nearly ah men. The Chinese labourer
is able and willing to work longer hours
under worse conditions than any other human
being. And, as has been proved on many a
stubbornly contested field, this same labourer,
when ably led, is a soldier of high endurance.

A Napoleon, a Bismarck or a Cavour is needed
to transform the seeming chaos of China into a
formidable menace to the world. Exactly what

150

WORLD POLITY IN 2030

variety of danger China might so present depends,
of course, upon this individual’s character and
aspirations. If he were primarily a soldier and
could command the war material necessary for
great modern campaigns, his armies might well
overrun Asia, and possibly part of Europe.
Such a catastrophe would make world-wars
chronic, for Europe would not accept any Asiatic
invasion, however successful. Wars of liberation
against the yellow domination, followed by still
further wars of revenge, would inevitably follow
one another. Civilisation, as we know it, would
break up permanently, just as the Roman civilisa-
tion cracked and crumbled under the strain of
constant barbarian invasion.

If China’s Napoleon were inspired by pacific
rather than by military ambitions, the fate of
Europe, though happier, would still be serious.
Presumably such a man would concentrate on
equipping his fellow-countrymen to create wealth
through industry, on setting up a vast chain of
factories throughout the land, on exploiting to
the uttermost every natural resource within his
country’s frontiers. To do so, of course, he

THE WORLD IN 203O

would be obliged to attract foreign capital to
China, and, therefore, to some extent, shackle
his own ambitions. But such a policy, ruthlessly
pursued, would enable China to undersell every
industrial competitor in the markets of the world,
and to throw the finances and prosperity of
Europe into bankrupt confusion for a generation.

The latter of these alternatives is more
probable ; not because a Chinese Tamerlane is
impossible, but because the prospect of great
wealth, from which power grows, is more con-
genial to the fundamental Chinese character than
that of illimitable but barren military conquest.
By 2030 Chinese competition in all markets may
well have become intensely critical ; Chinese
salesmen may be pushing their wares in every
town in the world ; and Europe may be drooping
before the onslaught.

The first result of such a campaign would
be to trustify all European industries against
the common enemy. It would destroy all
customs barriers on the Continent, and possibly
raise a mountainous pan-European tariff wall
against Chinese goods.

152

WORLD POLITY IN 203O

Such steps as these would be only the
preliminaries of confederation between the States
of Europe. But by the end of the twenty-first
century, these preliminaries may be transformed
into reality ; the States of Europe, acting in
concert, may launch a vigorous commercial
counter-attack in the hope of regaining their
place in the markets of the world. The United
States of America, who dread the " Yellow peril,”
would certainly lend substantial aid to Europe
in this ' trade war ; and it is most likely
that the white man would win. But he would
only win by recognising the importance and
vastness of his adversary. Ever afterwards
China would remain a mighty world power,
commanding and deserving an equal place with
the old-established powers of Europe and
America. Meanwhile, however, China lacks a
Napoleon

Scaremongers delight to inform us that the
British Raj in India wiU shortly be thrown
off by a population inspired by a spirit of
nationalism. India has never in the past
enjoyed the luxury of a "national” enthusiasm.

w 153

THE WORLD IN 2030

The peninsula, so far as we are cognisant of
its past history, has ever been parcelled out
among conflicting conquerors, themselves usually
of alien origin. If these potentates have
administered their territories wisely, their Indian
subjects have been content. If they have
oppressed and harassed the land, they have,
in the end, provoked their own downfall through
invasion and treachery. Nothing could be
further from the idea of an Indian "nationalism”
than this situation which, through the centuries,
has repeated itself in monotonous cycles as one
conquering race died out or- gave place to
another.

The spirit of nationalism in India is a new
growth ; and I am sure, not a very healthy one.
Despite all efforts, both British and native,
India remains largely ignorant and illiterate.
Many decades must pass before even the
rudiments of nationalist propaganda reach the
peasant cultivators of the soil. Moreover, it is
abundantly certain that if the nationalists had
their will, and the British withdrew from India,
the whole land would quickly decline into dis-

WORLD POLITY IN 203O

order and bloodshed. Hindu and Mohammedan
would leap at each other’s throats ; and after
a short struggle, the latter would certainly
emerge victorious. Most Hindus, especially the
richer and more responsible among them, are
abundantly aware of this. Even the Hindu
peasant is not altogether oblivious of the fact
that the British Raj stands between him and
disaster. The stability of that Raj, therefore,
remains infinitely more assured than one would
suppose from a perusal of ill-informed news-
paper reports and whispered menaces from the
bazaars. Few of the mischief-makers possess
even the smallest insight into the problems which
confront every government of India. Did they
possess such insight, they would realise that
the British government of India is the one
modern example of a successful benevolent
tyranny.

British rule in India will endure. By 2030,
whatever means of self-government India has
achieved, she will still remain a loyal and integral
part of the British Empire. Many longing eyes
are cast upon her. Russia especially would

155

THE WORLD IN 203O

be gratified to see the patient work of Bolshevist
a.gents crowned by a successful Communist out-
break on a large scale. This outbreak will not
occur. The future of India presents vast
difficulties and anxieties, but the devoted careers
of both Englishmen and Indians, working side
by side, will surmount them, and India will grow
to be a bulwark of strength, and an example of
prosperity to the whole empire.

There is another race besides the yellow and
the brown which could threaten the white
domination of the world. The negro peril has
not yet been exaggerated into a meaningless
scare by stupid journalism. But in the view of
many authorities, not without balance and
weight, the negro shadow looms across the world
of the future.

The racial consciousness of the negro is
dawning, The more intelligent negroes, having
watched Europe derive inspiration in sculpture,
in painting, in music and in dancing, from the
heart of Africa, begin to ask themselves whether ■
their race does not crystallise much more which
is vital and urgent in the human spirit. The

156

WORLD POLITY IN 203O

treatment which some humbler members of the
race have long received has awakened a sullen
feeling of black solidarity against the rest of
mankind. Imitative to the last degree, sharp-
witted and adroit, the negro is quick to adapt
every manifestation of European and American
life which captures his fancy.

He knows that Africa was his ancient and
undisputed home ; that the commercial and
industrial importance of Africa increases daily.
By 2030 the negro may possibly be on the way
to dispossess the European nations of their
parcelled lots of African territory, and to
establish in their stead a great all -black
republic, rich, self-supporting and aggressive.

Such a state might well be distinguished by
a religious peculiarity among all the states of
the world. For many years Christian missions
have won converts in the hearts of Africa as
they have in no other region. The reason is not
far to seek. If you offer a Brahmin or a Sufi
the Methodist creed in exchange for his own,
he will thank you politely, but point out that
he already possesses an elaborate and highly

157

THE WORLD IN 3030

thought-out religious philosophy which strikes
him as in every way superior to your substitute.
But to the African, oppressed by magic and
witch doctors, even the crudest Salvationism
comes as the opening of windows in a
stuffy, pitch-dark room. Missionaries free him
from cruelty and fear ; and, in consequence,
he embraces their simple, highly - coloured,
uncritical Christianity with all the fire of a
zealot.

The negro republic of 2030 — having first over-
come its Mohammedan citizens, who are also
increasing in large numbers — may be fiercely
Christian, in the downright unquestioning, fashion
that the early New England settlements were
Christian. It will be difficult for any other nation
to enter into diplomatic relationships or treaties
with such a state ; for international agreements
postulate a tacit but polite ignoring of religious
differences between the two contracting parties.
It wifi be particularly difficult for the British
Empire to treat with this republic, because
that Empire, whose citizens embrace every creed,
cannot possibly express official religious views. It

158

WORLD POLITY IN 203O

is likely that such a negro republic would quickly
be in acute issue with every other power in the
world. It might even, on ethical grounds, launch
the most terrible of all wars — a negro crusade
to win back the states of Europe from their
cynical paganism to the true faith, as laid down
by a black revivalist Pope at Timbuctoo.

Whatever nations or groups of nations confront
each other in 2030, it is important to discuss
to what extent they will be armed, and what
will be their capabihties of mutual destruction,
should war break out among them.

Opinion to-day is hardening all over the
world in favour of some measure of naval dis-
armament. Warships have grown so costly and
so short-lived ; and nations, with one exception,
so impoverished ; that the burden of supporting
vast navies is almost unendurable. It is, how-
ever, improbable that complete naval disarma-
ment will ever be achieved. It will certainly
not have become a reality by 2030. To put the
matter at its lowest level : the complete
scrapping of navies would automatically lead
to the arming of all merchant shipping ; for

159

THE WORLD IN 203O

how otherwise could peaceful shipowners hope
to protect themselves against a recrudescence of
piracy on the high seas ? Such armed merchant-
men would form the useful nucleus of a fleet in
the event of war ; the construction of such
ships, as long as ships exist — and I have not
forgotten my prophecies about the air — would
certainly be secretly subsidised by many states.
And so the world would confront again the
beginning of renewed, of more secret, more
sinister, naval competition.

The problem of military disarmament is little,
if at all, less embarrassing. Supposing that the
ten foremost powers of the world sign an inter-
national agreement, having the binding force of
law, to reduce their staiiding armies to the
minimum limit required for police purposes,
what power is to give this law any sanction ?
What force is to punish its open breach,- or to
overawe a criminal power which designs to break
it ? The ultimate sanction on which every law
relies for its observance is armed strength.
Remove this, and there remains the knowledge
that the law will be broken with impunity.

160

WORLD POLITY IN 203O

No nation which administers territories
inhabited by semi-civilised peoples will agree
to mihtary disarmament. A serious revolt,
carried out by savage hordes in an inaccessible
region, demands nowadays for its extinction an
armament almost sufficient to wage war against
a civilised people. Consider, for example,
Britain’s present responsibilities in the Middle
East, and on the frontiers of India. Did we
not maintain a considerable and highly-organised
military establishment, half of our Empire would
not remain a month in peace and safety.

Aerial disarmament combines the difficulties
of both naval and military disarmament. Com-
mercial airplanes can be adapted quickly and
readily for military purposes. The outlying
regions of every colonial empire are to-day
increasingly policed and protected from the air.
For example, the British Air Force, with signal
success, has now for some years undertaken the
protection and pacification of Irak.

In 2030, therefore, nations will stiU maintain
armaments ; though doubtless on a scale much
reduced from their present lavish provisions,

X 161

THE WORLD IN 2030

Naval building races will have become the night-
mare of an unhappy past ; but a strong force of
cruisers and light craft, a highly specialised
mechanical army, and many squadrons of air-
planes will be ready at the bidding of every
government with any pretensions to power. With
these resources, state will stiU be able to war
upon state. But the outbreak of such hostilities
will always be delayed and hampered by world
opinion, and by a perfected organisation for
international arbitration.

At present the most useful work of conciliation
performed by that strange hybrid, the League
of Nations, is of a commercial and fiscal nature.
Very valuable activity concerning commercial
treaties, patents, currency, exchange and a
thousand kindred subjects, goes on quickly
and smoothly at Geneva. This work is little
noticed in the press. No publicity is devoted
to its achievements ; yet they increase with
monotonous regularity. I believe that this
side of the League of Nations’ work will
grow until it utterly overshadows the polite
but often futile exchange of platitudes

162

WORLD POLITY IN 2O3O

between the diplomatic delegates of the
Great Powers. By 2030 the League will
have been established as a clearing-house of
international finance and business of aU kinds ;
its moral influence will, in consequence, be
enormous. Since it is the tendency for business
to overleap national frontiers in its new amal-
gamations ; the international business houses
of 2030, having nothing to gain from war, will
use the League in its new guise as an instrument
for checking the bellicose intentions of incom-
petent politicians.

Industry, the development of which dominated
the nineteenth century, was, in 1914, organised on
too small and national a scale to speak with
authority to governments. In 2030, the govern-
ments of the world will not be able lightly to
ignore its plain wishes or run counter to its
declared interests. Those interests will be pacific.
Therefore industry and a commercial League of
Nations wiU see to it that nations, though armed,
shall not fight, save to maintain their existence ;
and that swords shah, be beaten, if not into
ploughshares, at least into carburettors.

163

WOMAN IN 2030

A n average woman is more valuable to the
state than an average man ; but even the
most gifted woman is less valuable to the state
than an exceptional man. In this paradox lies
the kernel of the ceaseless discussion concerning
women and their future which so agitates the
popular press and the lecture-hall.

A sufficient number of healthy and poten-
tial mothers is absolutely essential to the
continued existence of any body politic. Every
civilised state tacitly recognises this fact by
forbidding women to sacrifice their lives in
battle as soldiers. Every civilised society reflects
it by such rules as that which prescribes that,
in a shipwreck, the women and children on
board the doomed vessel shall be granted the
first chance of safety. To most minds both these
examples of the preferential treatment of women
are disguised as a natural chivalry, deeply in-

164

WOMAN IN 2030

grained in the character of the civilised male.
But such chivalry as this is both more and less
than self-sacrifice : it is socially and economically
essential.

It may be argued, of course, that potential
fathers are as necessary as potential mothers to
the healthy continuance of the state. But such
an argument presupposes that the provisions of
a strict monogamy are the only possible arrange-
ment for satisfactory sexual relations between
citizens. If by the devastation of a future war
the population of any officially monogamous
European state were reduced by one half, then,
regrettable though it may to some appear, public
opinion in that state would not only counten-
ance, but would probably insist on, some form of
polygamy until the balance of the population was
restored.

In making this assertion I am supported by
history. When Islam was in the ascendant,
and continual wars of aggression levied a grievous
toll upon the male followers of the Prophet,
the polygamous license which he countenanced
was enjoyed to the full, not only by the

165

THE WORLD IN 2O3O

rich, hut by every warrior. But since the
conquests of Islam have been complete, and
the Mohammedan states have become fixed and
circumscribed, it has grown unusual for any but
a rich and influential man to marry more than
one wife. A duty has declined into an indulgence.

It is equally obvious that the man of creative
genius is more valuable to society and to the
state than any woman. Feminine genius has
adorned many ages and enriched the heritage of
many nations ; but it is, of course, a common-
place that it has never shown itself equal to
any of the supreme manifestations of genius in
the masculine mind. In making this statement
I am well aware that I challenge the whole
doctrine of the modem feminists, who fanatically
declare that the feminine mind is, if anything, a
finer, suppler and more accurate instrument
than its male counterpart. These feminine
champions explain away the fact that history
has yet to record the triumphs of superb female
genius by pointing out that, until the present
day, women have laboured under acute educa-
tional and social disadvantages compared with

166

WOMAN IN 2030

men. This argument is specious, but it is absurd.

Most of the male genius which has illuminated
past ages sprang from obscure and poor sur-
roundings. It was uneducated ; it was unendowed
with either social advantage or wealth ; it
achieved its self-expression in spite, rather than
by the aid, of society. Consider such varied
examples as Napoleon, Kant, Andrew Carnegie,
Charles Dickens, St. Thomas a Becket, Rienzi
and the late Lord Kelvin. None of these enjoyed
any cultural or social advantage over his fellows.
Each achieved renown, in his life - time or
posthumously, as an individual who bent either
circumstance or art to his purpose. Against the
long list of male genius, there can be named
only Joan of Arc, St. Catherine of Sienna,
Sappho, Florence Nightingale, and a few others.

The reason for this fact is not far to seek.
Most women eagerly embrace marriage and
maternity as a career. Be it observed, the
bearing and rearing of a family of healthy and
intelligent children is the utmost social service
which the normal female can perform. But,
having married and borne children in the earlier

167

THE WORLD IN 203O

years of her maturity, the woman of genius finds
herself somewhat handicapped for purposes of
self-expression. The male genius may sacrifice his
wife and family to his passion for self-expression.
They may starve ; they may labour in sweated
employments ; they may die, so long as his
idea is brought to parturition and attains
reality. Moreover, it is socially desirable, if
humanly deplorable, that this should be so.
Genius, as distinguished from talent, is rarely
hereditary, as the careers of the children of
most men of transcendant endowments prove.
Society is benefited by the contribution of one
genius far more than by the exemplary lives
of his talented children. No woman, however,
will wittingly thus prefer her genius to her
children.

Again it is fitting that nature should impose
such a limitation upon the female intellect.
Were it not so, the family as a unit could not
long survive the inevitable storms and crises
of life in a highly organised and complicated
civilisation.

These arguments may strike the reader as

168

WOMAN IN 2030

remote from a discussion of the probable state
of woman a century hence. But, in fact, their
postulation is essential as a preface to the
remarks I have to make.

In 2030 the prospect of woman’s liberation
from the dangers of childbirth will almost
certainly become a matter of general realisation.
This evolution, the most serious biological
departure since the natural separation of living
organisms into two sexes, will vitally transform
the whole status of women in society. Unless
their present importance and limitations be
clearly apprehended, their future development
cannot be apprehended.

Science, as I hinted in a previous chapter,
already foreshadows the possibility -of producing
living offspring in the laboratory from the germs
of various animal species. Hitherto no living
animal has been brought to birth ah initio) but
the foetus of various species has been removed
from the maternal organism and further
developed by skilful manipulation in biological
laboratories. It is certain that scientists will
one day succeed in producing a living human

V

169

THE WORLD IN 2000

infant by such means. This process, known
as ectogenesis, will be violently and furiously
opposed by the spiritual descendants of all
those who now attack contraception.

The first practitioners of ectogenesis will
possibly obtain the crown of martyrdom. Most
people hate and oppress every invention which
threatens habits or prestige. Hand-weavers
broke steam looms ; a British General opposed
the introduction of breech-loading rifles into the
army on the ground that it would transform
infantry into " long-range assassins " ; surgeons
fought the antiseptic inventions of Lister and
the asepsis of Pasteur. Similarly most mothers,
ignoring the benefits it will confer on their sex
as a whole, will rise in emotional indignation
against the mere mention of ectogenesis, and
will influence their husbands, sons and daughters
to follow their example.

By 2030 this battle will be joined, perhaps
even concluded. I do not suppose that by then
ectogenesis on a large or national scale will have
become practical. But the first ectogenetic child
may already be mingling with its normally

170

WOMAN IN 2030

produced school-fellows — any " decent ” school
will accept so naonstrous a pupil — and the whole
matter will have reached the state of an acute
controversy. Unless they have vastly changed
their habits and outlook by that period, the
women of the upper middle-class will most
bitterly oppose ectogenesis. These women, on
the whole, are the most protected and idle who
exist. Most of them are apt to imagine that
the mere production of two, or at most three,
children endows them with a mystic virtue.
Having accomphshed this need of maternity
they assume that they may hand over their
domestic arrangements to a housekeeper, and
their children to trained nurses, while they
themselves lead parasitic and aimless lives of
pleasure.

The introduction of ectogenesis on a national
scale will inevitably remove the false sanction
for their enjoyments. If they have not
reproduced, their kind, they wiU not be able
to claim as a right the leisure and the money to
amuse and dress themselves extravagantly.
They wiU he forced to discover other ways to

THE WORLD IN 2030

justify an empty and irritating existence.

Despite such a phalanx of opposition, and
despite the almost inevitable opposition of the
churches, it seems reasonable to suppose that
ectogenesis will slowly but surely be preferred
to normal childbirth as a means of replenishing
the human species.

The argument that it is “ unnatural ” cannot
be sustained for ever. All our civilisation is, in
some . respect, "unnatural.” The Noble Savage
of Rousseau and his sentimental contemporaries,
the man who lived close to and in acccordance
with nature, has long been exploded as a
ridiculous figment of the imagination, as unreal
as the Average Man of politicians, or the
Economic Man of the fiscal theorists. Very
certainly we must accept the fact that all our
civilisation is highly " unnatural.” Our clothes,
our food, our habits and our manners all violate
the " natural ” existence of the bushmen of
Australia. Yet I do not notice any profound
reaction in favour of a return to the barbarism
of the lower types of existing human creatures.
Even the process of childbirth in a modern

172

WOMAN IN 2030

civilised. European woman is highly "unnatural.”
There exist savage matrons in the heart of
Africa to whom the birth of a child is the passing
inconvenience of an hour. But no one proposes
that our women should imitate the life-cycle
of such savages, in order thus to escape or
minimise the pains of childbirth. Women accept
them as the price of a multitude of other
sophisticated diversions. Similarly one day they
will accept ectogenesis as the price of a freedom
they have never yet achieved in history.

What wiU be the immediate, and mediate,
results of the establishment of ectogenesis on a
national scale ? What will happen when the
present normal form of maternity becomes a
phenomenon not frequently experienced, and
perhaps even visited by legal rather than by
physical pains ? Its first and most prompt
result will be economic, because it will remove
the present disability under which women labour,
as compared to men, in every branch of industry
and commerce.

To-day, in most industries, women are paid
a lower wage than men. The feminists have

173

THE WORLD IN 2030

long resented the fact ; they agitate for equal
pay for all workers, irrespective of sex. To their
often plausible arguments, the employer has one
crushing answer. He maintains that, if he must
pay a man’s wage to each one of his hands, he
will take care that all these hands are male,
and that they perform a man’s work. Women,
at present, being specialised for the all-important
duty of child-bearing, cannot perform the same
amount of manual labour, even of a mild
variety, as men.

To refute me, the feminists will produce the
bouncing wenches who supply the labour
demands of match-factories, cotton-mills, and
many of the lighter trades. Again the feminist
argument fails ; because the employment of
these girls at low wage has long been a
remarkable example of industrial parasitism.
These young women are invariably the daughters
of artisans and labourers ; their contributions
to the domestic budget of their parents, however
small, usually make all the difference between
indigence and modest luxury. If they were not
at work, they would be an incubus upon their

174

WOMAN IN 2030

parents. Therefore they work for far lower
wages than unsupported female labour could
be persuaded to accept. A large part of their
wages may be expended on pretty clothes and
innocent amusements^ but a certain part
reaches their mothers' hands, and swells the
amount of available housekeeping money.

It is obvious, in such a case, that the employer
of such girls is, in reality, subsidised by their
fathers. Certain pohticians cry out continually
against such an arrangement as immoral and
wicked. But, in practice, it often works
admirably. The girls are weU-fed, well-clothed
and happy ; their parents’ comfort is increased ;
and an industry is enabled to prosper which
might otherwise not be able to exist.

Ectogenesis will quickly enable men and
women to be paid equal wages for equal work
— since the women of an ectogenetic age would
soon be as capable of continuous industrial
employment as their brothers, husbands and
fathers. It is not suggested by this that women
will ever be fitted for such tasks as iron-puddling,
riveting or navvying ; nor will they need to be

175

THE WORLD IN 2030

SO, because by 2030 such heavy labour will be
entirely performed by machinery. But by
achieving economic parity with man, the woman
of an ectogenetic age will accomplish the feminist
dream of equality in the only possible way.
Until man and woman are capable of identical
functions in the industrial and commercial
worlds, all legal provisions which place them
on an equal footing are basically unfair to the
man. It is this fact which hinders the feminine
champions of the present day from realising their
ambitious and irrational programme. I can
console them with the assurance that they wiU
obtain all they desire in an ectogenetic age.

Although its economic effect on woman is
the most important result which ectogenesis
will bring, I must consider also its effects on
marriage and family life, as we know them.
First, ectogenesis will entirely divorce physical
love from the reproduction of the species. The
common practice of contraception has already,
in some measure, accustomed certain classes of
the population to this idea ; its complete
realisation will occupy many generations

176

WOMAN IN 2030

and create a violent social readjustment.

I do not imagine that ectogenesis will empty
the homes of married couples of children. If
one thing about the nurture and upbringing
of children is certain — and few things appear
above dispute — ^it is that a child who receives
devoted mothering in its babyhood, and
unlimited parental companionship in its early
youth, thrives far more sturdily than the baby
reared in the most scientific and germ-free
institution. To realise the force of this assertion,
one has only to compare the crowing infants
who are petted by poor mothers, with the
artificial inmates of expensive baby clinics.
The impersonal nurse cannot replace the, some-
times perhaps, too personal mother. Therefore
ectogenetic babies will, at birth, often be adopted
by suitably married couples. It is even possible
that their foster-mother will be enabled, by
the aid of science, to nourish her children in the
natural manner.

Why substitute ectogenesis for natural birth ?
Because there seems no other way of ensuring
that the state shall receive adequate supplies

z 177

THE WORLD IN 203O

of the type and sex of citizens of whom it stands
in need. The stud-farm methods advocated by
the eugenist of the present so revolt every
impulse of human nature that they will never
be generally adopted. Yet eugenics of one sort
or another is a certainty of future politics.
The indiscriminate increase of the most useless
type of citizen, accompanied by the voluntary
sterilisation of the best type, is the greatest
menace which threatens our civilisation.

Ectogenesis appears the only form of
salvation which science and ingenuity can
suggest ; for by regulating this process, citizens
of any desired physical and mental complexion
can be produced at will. Moreover, the same
process which enables the foster-mother of the
ectogenetic infant to provide it with the nourish-
ment provided by nature, may be so developed
by biological research, that it will stimulate
in her identical emotions towards this babe as
though she had herself borne it. Obviously
this method of practical eugenics is more certain
of success than the crude solutions of the same
problem offered by the unimaginative and

178

WOMAN IN 2030

generally celibate eugenists of the present epoch.

As I have Indicated previously, the general
level of prosperity will have enormously increased
by 2030. When, therefore, ectogenesis is
nationally established, the woman with a genius
for motherhood will be able to adopt as large
a " family ” as she desires, without worrying
about her husband’s ability to feed, clothe and
educate it. Nor will there exist any social
reason why the married woman with weak
maternal passions should concern herself at aU
with motherhood. It will in fact obviously
advantage both herself, her husband and society
if she does not do so, but concerns herself with
other activities.

An almost illimitable field wiU be open to such
a woman. Her domestic duties will not occupy
more than a portion of her time ; because,
although domestic servants will exist only as a
memory, her home wiU practically be self-
conducted. In passing, however, I would point
out that this dearth of domestic servants will
bring with it one most salutary result. It will
force every woman, whatever her position, to

179

THE WORLD IN 2030

scrape an acquaintance with the arts of house-
keeping and the kitchen. Though beyond a
minimum of work in her home, she may choose
to follow a round of pleasures, this irreducible
minimum will prevent her developing into one
of the utterly idle women who are the plague of
society to-day. Most women of 2030, however,
having received a highly evolved education,
lasting until their twenty-first year, will choose,
unless engaged in rearing a family, to follow some
definite career.

Scientific research will absorb the energies
of many. At present our knowledge of the
physical universe consists of a number of small
patches, linked up by tenuous and often not
clearly defined bonds. Before our descendants
can boast that their knowledge is in any degree
comprehensive, an enormous amount of routine
research must be carried out. To-day this work
is not undertaken, simply because funds and
trained students do not exist to accomplish it.
By 2030 tens of thousands of women will be
busy on this most valuable work in laboratories
scattered all over the world. Although I have

WOMAN IN 2030

called this research " routine ” work, it is
not by any means dull to the executant. Rather
it carries with it that complete satisfaction
which scientific investigation almost alone brings
to the individual suited to its performance.

Women are specially apt for this work. Their
patience, painstaking application, and calm
temper have already recommended them to
professors of aU kinds for such tasks. The
results of their labours wiU, by 2030, have
produced a vast mass of correlated data from
which some future Einstein may synthesise a
new theory of matter, or a Darwin yet unborn
deduce a transcendant biological discovery. The
patient labours of such women will transform
physiology and psychology into sciences as exact
as physics. These services wiU enormously
benefit humanity ; they wiU bring to their
performers a happiness which no life of leisure,
however athletic, could possibly induce.

If thousands of women are temperamentally
suited to research, as many more are endowed
with executive gifts of a high order. Up to
the present day few such women have harnessed

THE WORLD IN 2030

their talents to the chariot of society. A few,
rejecting the former limitations which convention
placed on feminine activities, have provided
history with such figures as Florence Nightingale,
Queen Elizabeth or the legendary Dido ;
but most have lived thwarted lives exercising
powers, which required a national scope for their
development, upon the affairs of a village or
even a family. In 2030 society will eagerly
avail itself of such w''omen. They will be found
at the head of government departments,
as managing directors of great commercial
undertakings, as organisers of every kind of
social and cultural activity. At present their
promotion to such posts is partially prevented
by the fact that many men are loath, consciously
or unconsciously, to serve as subordinates to
women. Luckily the levelling process of
ectogenesis will remove this irrational bar, and
leave women unhandicapped to achieve what-
ever position they are competent to maintain.

Concerning the possibility of a great woman
statesman directing our national destinies in
2030, I am a trifle sceptical. I do not believe

182

WOMAN IN 2030

that statesmanship, as history exhibits it, is
either congenial or indeed possible to feminine
genius. Even when man and woman are placed
in relations of complete equality, it is doubtful
whether centuries of education will alter the
basic differences which divide the male mind
from the female. I am told by biologists that
an essential distinction exists between each
minute cell which composes the body of a woman
and those which contribute to a male existence.
This variation, of course, extends to the cells of
the brain : so long as the two sexes remain
separated, so long will they continue to exhibit
diverse and complementary mental development.
It is on these grounds that I doubt the
emergence of a woman Chatham, or a dowager
Disraeli. I do not suggest that in other
spheres women will not rise to distinctions
comparable with those achieved by these two
great men.

A more obvious field for feminine excellence
in 2030 is offered by the arts. To-day many
distinguished women artists enrich the life of
the world. Nor is the woman artist any

183

THE WORLD IN 2O30

latter-day phenomenon. She certainly flourished
in ancient Greece^ and she has ever since
maintained an honourable position among her
male colleagues.

But, disregarding Samuel Butler’s amusing
theory that the Odyssey was the work of a
woman, I cannot recall any supreme artist who
was a woman. I shall immediately be challenged
with Sappho (whose name I have myself quoted
already) and such women novelists as Jane
Austin and George Eliot. Sappho, unluckily,
exists only as an almost mythical poet, whose
works survive in fragments, superb in isolation,
but inconsiderable in sum. We have taken
from antiquity her tremendous reputation
at its face value. The ancient world possessed
an excellent sense of poetic values ; it acclaimed
Sappho as magnificent ; we agree, adding that
so far as the evidence to hand goes, it does not
refute the ancient world. But she is certainly as
legendary an individual as Homer; no one will
allow the claims of women to the highest artistic
honours to be based on her legend. Of the
women novelists, I would only remark that,

184

WOMAN IN 3030

exquisite though their work may be, I cannot
believe that an unbiased critic will compare it
with the masterpieces of Fielding, Cervantes,
Dostoievsky or Balzac, or place it in the same
supreme class.

In the other arts the achievement of women
plainly falls short of the best. No woman
Pheidias, Michael Angelo or Beethoven has yet
delighted mankind. Nor, I must honestly con-
fess, do I believe that by 2030 any such woman
prodigy will have arisen. In saying this I
return to the opening remarks of this chapter,
and reiterate the conviction that, however
galling it may be to feminists, the most
renowned geniuses have been and always wiU
be male.

By 2030 a more liberal civilisation, and greater
freedom for expression, will have enabled women
vastly to expand their accomplishments in
every sphere of life. But to the end of history
they must rest content with falling just short
of the best work done by men. They are
assured, however, of compensations denied to
men. In 2030, as in 1930, woman will remain

A3 185

THE WORLD IN 203O

the inspiration, the consolation, and the desire
of men. Whatever a man may do, he does
largely because of some woman with whom his
life is intimately complicated.

In 2030 women will still use men as the media
by which their greatest triumphs are wrought ;
they will still be able, by their wit and charms,
to direct the activities of the most able men
towards heights which they could never other-
wise hope to reach.

186

THE FUTURE IN 203 0

THE FUTURE IN 2030

S INCE primitive antiquity the human heart
has earnestly desired to probe the future
and scan its mysteries. Prophets, even when
they habitually foretold approaching disasters,
occupied places of honour and advantage at the
courts of ancient kingdoms. Joseph, so the
authors of Genesis inform us, was advanced to
second place in the reahn of Egypt, because
he read the future as dreams revealed it to
Pharaoh. Not a great while later Moses acquired
enormous prestige by repeatedly foretelling
plagues which more than fulfilled his foreboding
of their horrors.

The same yearning to know the future runs
as an undertone through the greatest Greek
literature. The Delphic Apollo haunts the richest
and most sacred shrine in all the Greek world ;
Cassandra prophesies in a trance ; Odysseus
in Hades questions the wise dead concerning

i8r

THE WORLD IN 203O

his future fate. And, because Homer devotes
so much space to this tour across the Styx,
Vergil, when he came to compose the jEnead,
did likewise, and dispatched the priggish .^Eneas
to hear how his race should one day rule the
world from Rome. This interlude of Vergil’s,
however, is more than mere imitation of his
ancient master. Though they might be the
most practical and prosaic race of all antiquity,
the Romans shared the Greek passion for
prophecies. Which general of the Republic set
out on a military expedition without first con-
sulting the auguries ? Which merchant sold
slaves, or purchased grain, or signed a contract
unless he first slew doves, and, by an examination
of their viscera, attempted to deduce whether
prosperity or ill-luck would attend his bargain ?

The Christian Church did not approve such
profane attempts to forestall, as it were, the
designs of an omnipotent Providence ; but the
universal respect for soothsaying was too deeply
ingrained for the paramount authority of a
mediaeval Vatican to suppress. The sortes
VirgilimcB were universally consulted by the

THE FUTURE IN 2030

knowing. Cardinals even trusted their infallibility
before entering the conclave which was to elect
the next successor of St. Peter.

More recently^ since natural science became
established on some kind of exact basis, the
habit of prophesying has grown chronic. The
late M. Jules Verne’s novels, founded on the
foretelling of future mechanical developments,
rapidly established themselves in the front rank
of best-seUers. Mr. H. G. Wells, instructed with
no small degree of real scientific knowledge,
carried the game a stage further, and produced
prophetic novels as remunerative to their author
as they were exciting to his readers.

To-day every great city supports an army
of prophets — crystal-gazers, astrologers, and
mere magicians, in addition to such compara-
tively scientific seers as racing tipsters and
stock-exchange paragraphists. Yet, for all their
hard work, the future stretches before us in this
year 1930 murky, obscure and terrible. In
certain directions, and in general terms, it is
indeed possible to indicate, as I have done in
preceding chapters, that certain developments are

i8g

THE WORLD IN 2030

probable in the course of the next hundred years.
Beyond this, only the brazen quack or the self-
hypnotized religious fanatic, who believes that
he enjoys the particular confidence of his deity,
would venture to go.

Will the Future appear equally dark to our
descendants in the decade which opens on New
Year’s Day, 2030 ? Here is the question which
I must strive to answer in concluding this series
of forecasts. And, strangely enough, though it
appears at first sight a nebulous problem, I
believe it to be more easily answerable in general
terms than some of the questions to which I
have already attempted to propound replies.

In discussing the Future, as it will appear
in 2030, we must, of course, first postulate a
reasonable and peaceable development for the
world during the intervening period. As I have
before emphasised, a world war waged to its
logical conclusion in the 1970’s might very
conceivably make bankrupt our civilisation, and
reduce our grandchildren to barbarism. Such
a catastrophe must be left out of account by so
imperfect a prophet as the present standards

190

THE FUTURE IN 203O

of knowledge force me to be. I cannot, nor
can any of my contemporaries, prophesy
particular events such as another world war.
We can only observe current tendencies and
forecast how they are likely to develop.

By the year 2030, however, I believe that
prophecy in relation to many future occurrences
will be within the wit of a shrewd man. To
our descendants the future will no longer be
largely unilluminated ; large tracts of it will
be already explorable. Barring fatal accidents,
it may well be possible to foretell even what
life holds in store for any particular man or
woman.

Primarily, since infectious diseases will be'
stamped out by 2030, and cures discovered for
the scourges of humanity, life wiU stretch out
much more certainly for our descendants. The
average life-span will have increased to a hundred
and twenty years, so that a young man in the
middle of his University career will reasonably
anticipate another century of active life before
his conscious existence terminates in painless
euthanasia.

THE WORLD IN 2030

In order to catch a glimpse of the future as
it will appear to such a one, let us suppose that
his tutor requires an essay from him, dealing
with “ The most important aspects of human
life in the twenty-second century.” Such
impositions on the high spirits of youth are
regularly fixed by remorseless tutors at the
present time. And, considering the average rate
of progress at our older universities, it is
conceivable that they will still be set in 2030.

Reluctantly abandoning an appointment to
fly across and watch a football match at the
Algeciras Stadium against Gibraltar University,
our undergraduate will settle down in his college
rooms, insert a sheet of paper in his typewriter,
and proceed, I believe, somewhat in the following
manner.

” During the twentieth century attention and
research were mainly concentrated on material
and economic progress. The world war of 1914-
igi8 destroyed so much wealth so quickly that
our great-grandfathers were compelled to discover
cheaper and better means of industrial pro-
duction, or to face the alternative of national

THE FUTURE IN 2030

bankruptcies during the 1930's and 1940’s. This
necessity settled the fate of the remaining sixty
years of the century, during which most of the
more obviously important and beneficial material
discoveries were made. Molecular energy was
first liberated and then controlled. The Cam-
bridge biologists bred and acclimatised a lichen
which bound the shifting sands of the world’s
deserts, and made them fit for cultivation. The
tides were extensively harnessed in North
America and Scandinavia during the 1980’s
the Anglo-German chemical trust introduced and
popularised a cheap, palatable and varied
synthetic diet about the same time by the simple
method of offering their 5,000,000 employees
higher wages if they undertook to feed solely
on the trust’s factory-produced food.

” Early in the present century, however, the
centre of gravity in scientific progress shifted.
After the riots and civil disturbances caused,
in 2010, by the introduction of state-supported
ectogenesis in Nebraska, the world’s interest
was concentrated on the theory of Scientific
Psychology, built up by a collaboration of

193

B2

THE WORLD IN 203O

workers under Professor Yan Ling at Pekin
University.

“ Although this theory has yet to be fully
expounded to the lay mind, and although all its
practical corollaries have not yet been worked
out, its publication is obviously the most
important intellectual event since Professor
Einstein wrecked Newtonian space early in
the last century. .The practical effect of this
theory must be prodigious. In fact, the whole
future development of mankind is controlled by
its application.

" The Yan Ling theory has transformed
psychology into a science as exact as mathe-
matics and physics. Before it was discovered,
psychology could only be compared with pre-
atomic chemistry ; it floundered, unable to
reduce its masses of data to a few simple and
invariable generalisations or ‘ laws.' It is true
that, when psychology first attracted the
attention of scientific workers, numerous theories
immediately sprang up. Perhaps the most
notable were propounded by Professor Freud of
Vienna, who explained all things in terms of

194

THE FUTURE IN 203O

suppressed libido, and by Watson, who with
others like him experimented in the United
States. Neither of these theories, however, nor
any of their successors, until that of Professor
Yan Ling, fulfilled the essential function of an
adequate scientific theory — that it must not
only explain and co-ordinate aU known facts,
but must also provide grounds on which new
relations may be deduced and afterwards
verified by experiment.

" The most obvious future results of the Yan
Ling theory will be poHtical. The first of its
experts who enters politics must rapidly achieve
Cabinet rank. Aware of the arguments which
will convince each particular man, he will be
irresistible in council. Able to gauge the exact
temper of every audience, he will be aU-powerful
in the House, or before the microphone.
Fortunately for the State, however, his triumph
will be short-hved. Soon his particular knowledge
will become the material of normal education ;
in old age, he will find himself confronted by
audiences who can analyse his motives as easily
as he can estimate their mood. Then his .special

195

THE WORLD IN 2030

pleading will be greeted with derision, and his
underlying motives betrayed by the very argu-
ments with which he seeks to make them
palatable.

" By 2130, therefore, we must anticipate the
complete decay of politics as we know them.
The whole machinery of national government
and international relationships will require
remodelling during the next hundred years. The
spokesmen of parties or peoples will be able to
advance their cause only by completely truthful
statements of fact, reinforced by exact explanation
of what such facts mean. All rhetoric wiU
become fustian, all argument bad argument.

" Similarly forensic eloquence will cease in
Courts of Law. Prevarication whether by
prisoner, witness or advocate will be instantly
detected, and, therefore, worse than useless.
What win it avail a murderer if a Demosthenes
demand his acquittal from a jury which has
been scientifically convinced of his guilt on
psychological grounds ? Personally, therefore,
since exploring the more elementary sequels
of the Yan Ling theory, I have abandoned an

THE FUTURE IN 2O3O

ambition to enter politics by way of the Bar,
and have decided to concentrate my energies
on the study of the plankton of the Caribbean
Sea, a subject which holds large commercial
possibilities besides an absorbing scientific
interest.

" Though the effects of the new psychology
on public life seem likely to occupy the main
attention of thoughtful men for the next century
or more, its application to the arts will not he
less revolutionary, or wholly pleasant to con-
template. Plainly, a generation expert in this
science will not be able to appreciate the element
of ' surprise ' in art. And, both in literature
and in music, surprise constitutes a large measure
of artistic success. No matter, for example, how
often one reads Robinson Crusoe, the finding of
that footprint in the sand never fails to
communicate its surprise ; the reader shares
the solitary castaway’s amazement in learning
that he is no longer alone.

" In the future this precious faculty for
astonishment will vanish. The twenty-second
century will be able to deduce, from what it

197

THE WORLD IN 203O

has already read, that a ‘ surprise ’ is inevitable
before the end of the next chapter. No climax
will have any point ; it will appear as prosaic
as the fact that one and three make four. Music,
too, wiU only charm as an ingenious texture of
sounds ; literature will only be valuable when
it explains or describes. It will be impossible
for either composer or author to suspend the
emotions of his audience, and to arouse either
their wonder or awe.

" On the other hand every book will become
an autobiography, revealing to its readers the
most carefully kept secrets of its author's life
and character. Our descendants, therefore, wiU
enjoy a satisfaction denied to us, They will
finally decide such hotly debated questions as
to whether Homer was a blind old harpist, a
crowd or a woman ; whether Shakespeare wrote
his own plays ; whether Dickens was a paragon
or an unashamed egotist; and whether Tolstoy
was 'sincere*. In the same way architecture,
sculpture and painting wiU betray the minds
responsible for them. Vanbrugh’s Restoration
morals wiU be deduced from a glance at the

198

THE FUTURE IN 203O

chaste grandeurs of Castle Howard ; Benvenuto
Cellini’s cheerful sensualism will cry out for
notice in his salt-cellars; and Andre del Sarto’s
final untrustworthiness will be apparent from a
glance at any of his pictures.

"It is clear that all human relationships
wiO. grow highly complicated, once the new
psychology becomes common property. The
conventional lies which lubricate our every
contact with our fellows will be transparent.
The true reasons for proposals of marriage will
at once occur to women ; husbands and wives
will no longer be able to smooth family life
by judicious falsehoods ; the education of young
children wiU become a nightmare.

" Another revolution wiU take place in
commerce. Advertising, after a period of intense
success (while only the advertisers and not their
public have mastered the Yan Ling postulates)
will die. Who will care to proclaim his goods
in specious half-truths to potential customers
able to detect how much of this is sincere and
how much mere persuasion ? Much to their
annoyance, the publicity experts of the next

199

THE WORLD IN 203O

century will be forced to confine their activities
to simple statements that the goods they wish
to sell are manufactured and easily procurable.
More than this will positively kill trade. What
applies to advertisers, applies even more forcibly
to commercial travellers. Buyers will purchase
goods purely on the intrinsic merits and prices
of the samples laid before them. Salesmanship,
like minstrelsy or Highland dancing, may survive
as a quaint art, displayed at gatherings,
Eisteddfods, and similar occasions ; but it will
do less to advance business than drawing-room
charades.

" Every professional man wiU feel the results
of this psychological revolution during the coming
century. Doctors will no longer be able to
inspire a will-to-live in the critically ill by sheer
force of personality. Clergymen will face
peculiarly awkward predicaments. Compelled
by iron and age-old tradition to pretend a
standard of thought and conduct which is
humanly possible to perhaps only one in a dozen
among them, they will be found out in every
insincerity and evasion. Until matters adjust

200

THE FUTURE IN 203O

themselves, and a larger laxity is permitted to
the clergymen by public opinion — as it must be,
or the Christian churches will dissolve —
the wretched men will hardly dare to engage in
conversation except with members of their own
kind.

“ Perhaps some few of the preceding remarks
are slightly exaggerated. If this be so, it is
because I have purposely emphasised the more
alarming results which must inevitably follow
the popularisation of the Yan Ling psychology.
I have done so in order to demonstrate that,
during the coming century and after, civilised
human beings will be faced with a complete
change in all intellectual, emotional and moral
values. Hitherto the ego of our neighbour has
remained almost a closed book to us. By 2130
everyone will wear not only his heart, but his
character and intellect also on his sleeve. In
order to accommodate this psychological revolu-
tion, human relationships will be forced to change
even more fundamentally than they did when
the Pagan world gave way to Christendom.

" During the past two centuries man has

201

C2

THE WORLD IN 2030

remained basically much as he was, while his
physical environment has violently altered,
William Pitt, Lloyd George, and our present
Premier, when they meet in the Elysian Fields,
will be able to compare notes and to exchange
stories as men who instinctively understand
one another's point of view. Though Pitt acted
on Europe through such agents as flint-lock
muskets, three-deckers and Nelson ; though
Lloyd George’s weapons were newspapers, trench
warfare and torpedoes ; though our own Premier
commands television propaganda, death-rays and
the world’s largest radium reserve, the three men
are fundamentally akin. Political manoeuvre,
party strategy, and national mobilisation for a
great end, lit naturally into their mental habit.

" But a century and a half hence, when Pitt
and George welcome the man who was First
Minister of the Crown in 2130 a.d., they will
greet one who is unintelligible, though speaking
their language, because his habits of thought,
his instinctive suppositions, and his very instincts
are totally at variance with their own.

” I suggest that during the coming century

202

THE FUTURE IN 203O

the solution of the psychological problems, at
which I have hinted, will so absorb the most
powerful human minds that material advances
and inventions will be comparatively neglected.
The difficulties of human relationships will grow
so intense, and demand such instant solutions,
that all men will turn to attempting their
liquidation.”

Thus our undergraduate of 2030. In this
slight essay, of course, he shows himself obsessed
by one aspect of his world’s future. I agree
with him that this aspect will be by far the
most important that his grandchildren must
face ; but in order to epaUr his tutor, he has
painted too distressing a picture of the years
following 2130. Although this new psychology,
which wiU certainly be elaborated, cannot fail
to present human ingenuity with tremendous
problems, it wiU not be without compensating
advantages. It will, for example, offer the first
effective guarantee against wars which man has
devised. War is invariably the fruit of economic
pressure, fear, or misunderstanding. Sometimes,
in history, men have made wars to advance their

Z03

THE WORLD IN 203O

personal ambitions ; but more than a man’s
ambition is necessary for the prosecution of
such military operations. An army is essential,
together with a population pi'epared to support
that army in the field. In order to provide
themselves with such an army and a complaisant
population, bellicose and ambitious rulers have
even persuaded their countrymen that a lie was
the truth, and that the nation must once again
fight for its existence. No people educated in
an exact psychology could be deceived in this
way.

Not only does this psychological invention
hold out to our remote descendants a hope of
lasting world peace, but it provides also a promise
of close and fruitful international co-operation
on aU matters of importance. A Geneva
Conference between scientific psychologists,
representing every first'Class power, would be
able to discuss and decide crucial issues in an
atmosphere uncharged with mutual suspicions
and jealousies. Really "open” diplomacy (about
which so much nonsense is poured out to-day)
would then for the first time be practicable —

204

THE FUTURE IN 203O

because then for the first time in many centuries
human nature will have undergone a radical
orientation.

I believe, therefore, that our descendants in
2030 will look at the future constructively.
Disarmament, down to minimum police require-
ments against large-scale brigandage and piracy,
will be an international issue of the near future.
Plans will be laid for a broad world policy
towards Africa, the final completion of which
may be timed for about the year 2100. This
will include the conversion (already mentioned
in another chapter) of the Sahara into a second
Mediterranean, the drainage and clearance of
the Congo and Niger basins, the exploitation
of Central Africa’s industrial potentialities, the
abolition of the isthmus of Suez, and the
establishment of a Negro Free State protected
by a Pan-European pact.

In 2030 the American States will be looking
forward to a similar work in the Amazon basin
and other undeveloped areas. Australia will
inaugurate the complete irrigation and
fertilisation of her vast central wastes.

205

THE WORLD IN 2030

At the same time a world scientific commission
will be in permanent session, mobilising the
research students of the planet for even more
ambitious and far-reaching undertakings.
Wealth will be collected all through the twenty-
first century. Then in 2100 the artificial thawing
of the polar regions may be tackled. As an
alternative, the conversion of Central Asia into
a fertile, and climatically delightful, dwelling-
place may be deemed of great importance to
progress. As a third possibility, the pooled
resources of humanity may be marshalled to
devote the first half of the twenty-second century
to the control and stabilisation of the weather
over the whole surface of the planet.

It is, of course, idle for me to suggest which
of these, or of other similar cosmic improvements,
will be chosen by 2030 for its grandchildren's
task. I am only concerned to point out that
such serious allocations of human wealth and
ingenuity for the ensuing hundred years will
be undertaken by the men of that period. The
statesmen and scientists of the twenty-first
century wiU enjoy such security and wealth as

206

THE FUTURE IN 2030

will justify a long view. They will be able to
map out the world's future for a century or
more, as calmly as a Cabinet now plans legislation
for a session, or the president of an automobile
manufacturing company decides production for
next year’s sales season.

Nor will these 2030 architects of the future
cast their designs in the dark. They will be
supplied with figures, statistics and diagrams,
which will exactly guide them on such points
as America’s population in 2150, Britain’s coal
reserve in 2109, and the University of Smyrna’s
available output bf expert biologists in 2075.
The future will not be dark or obscure to them.
Its twilight wiU be serviceable for the inception
of gigantic and noble schemes, whose fulfil-
ment can be calculated by astronomers two
centuries ahead.

Nevertheless this calm certainty concerning
the future must weaken, even destroy, that
spirit of adventure, that feeling that we are all
the children of chance, which consoles us to-day
for much that is imperfect in contemporary
civilisation. As I look forward towards the

207

THE WORLD IN 203O

world in which my great-grandchildren may
live, and in which I hope they will distinguish
themselves, I find a certain solace in reflecting
that my own birthday occurred towards the
latter end of the nineteenth century.

208

INDEX

iENEAS, l88.

Aerodyaes, 120-130.

Africa, world policy towards,
58, 205.

Agricalture, decay of, 17, 18,
20, 21, 49, 50, 55-6r.

Air, man’s universal thorough-
fare — effect on inter-
national relations, 135.

Air services, 123, 124.

Air-ferry, Atlantic, 123, 124.
Airplane and transport, 126,
127, 128.

— and the present conquest of
the air, iig.

— and the internal-combustion
motor, 122-125, 129.

— and the atomic-energy
motor, 29.

— and the molecular-energy
motor, 125-127, 129.

— and the electric motor, 128,
129.

— and sliipping, 126, 127.

— cruising height of, 127, 131.

— for week-end travel, 112-114.

— in warfare, 24, 27-29, 37,

41-45. 135-137-

— propelled by reaction, 129-131.
— speed of, 122, 127, 131.

— ^versus motor-car, 61, 62, iig.
Airship, 123, 124.

Aluminium, the future of, 64, 65.
Amazon, 58, 205.

Anaesthesia, local, il.

Anaesthetics, 2, 25.

Ancient Greece, 9, 183, 187, r88.
Angelo, Michael, 185.

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 100.

— race, genius of, gg.

Arcliitecture and industry, 67-69.

Armies, composition of modern,
33. 34-

Artificial silk industry, 59, 60,
io8, log.

Artillery, 30, 32, 35.

— ^in action at long range, 31.

— ^use of, in European War, 40.

Arts, development of the, 95, 96.

— and Woman, r 83-1 85.

Astronomy, Ptolemaic, 80,

— Galilean, 80.

Atomic energy, 4, 5, 23, 29, 123.

— ^possible effect on world
geography, 4.

— ^possible effect on world
climate, 5.

Atomic explosion, 23.

Austin, Jane, 184.

Australia and irrigation, 205,

Babies, ectogenetic, 177-178.
Bacteria, and atmospheric
nitrogen, 17,

— and the digestion of cellulose,
18.

Balzac, 185.

Beau Bruramel, 103.

Beaverbrook, Lord, loG.
Beethoven, 183.

Beliefs and human life, 76-79,

— and medicine, 82.

— and biology, 82-84.

— and education, 89-92.

— and psychology, 85-89.

— and science, 81-92, g6, 97.
Bentham, 82.

Biology, an exact science, 80, 181.
— applied, 11-19, 56, 169-178,

193-

— 4:ate of progress of, 22.

D2

209

INDEX

Birth, eotogenetic, ii, 14, 15,

169-178.

Bismarck, 148, 150,

B 14 riot, Louis, 120.

Books, 108.

Britain and industry, 49-55,
57, 66-70.

— and the European War, 141.
British Empire and India,

153-156.

— and South Africa, 145.

— and the Irish Free State, 145.
— and the Roman Empire, 146.
— and the idea of nationality, 146.
— and the transference of in-
dustrial centres, 146.
Broadcasting, 8, 114, 115.

— of electrical energy, 128, 129,
Bullet, the power of the, 30, 32.

— versus Tank, 33.

Butler, Samuel, 184.

Canada ; the possibility of
UNION with the United
States of America, 147.
Carnegie, Andrew, 167.

Cavalry, 30, 35.

— tactics in future warfare, 36, 37.
Cavour and Italy, 138, 140, 150.
Cellini, Benvenuto, 199.

Cellulose and the synthetic food
industry, 57, 58.

— conversion into sugar, ig.

— digestion of, 18,

Cervantes, 185.

Chaplin, Lord, 100,

Charles I, 118,

Charles II, 106.

Chatham, 183.

Chemistry, applied, 9, 10, 17,

56, 193.

— rate of progress of, Z2,

.China and the " Yellow Peril,”
^8-153.

Christianity and the negro,

157-159.

City, a self-supporting unit,
20, 21.

City-State, 77.

— and the Roman Empire, 146.
Civilisation, Chinese, 150.

— effect of a single individual on,
98, 99.

— ^in the Middle Ages, 76, 135,
138, 188, 189,

— Roman, 151, 188.

— the future unit of, 50.

Clay, extraction of aluminium
from, 65.

Cleanliness, 103, 104.

. — and Mr. Ford, 104.

— and Industry, 104.

Climate, possible effect of atomic
energy on, 5.

Clothes, 95, 108-112.

Coal and the " Fine Chemical-”
industry, 55.

Coal Age, end of the, 5, xj, 50-55.
Cocktail habit and drunkenness,
101, 102.

Concert halls and theatres, 108,

115. tiS.

Congo, 58, 205.

Copper, shortage of, and the
electrical industry, 63, 129.
Cornwallis, Lord, 46.

Cotton industry, decay of, 59-61
Countryside and industry, 66-69.
Crdcy and Poictiers, 45.

Cromwell, 118,

Dalton, 84.

Dalton’s atomic theory, 84.
Darwin, Charles, 181.

Day, effect of tidal friction on
the length of the, 7, 8.
Degeneracy, 100-102.

Democracy and world peace,
140, 141,

Demosthenes, 196,

Dickens, Charles, 167, 198.

Dido, 182,

Disarmament and scientific
psychology, 203-205.

— aerial, 161.

— ^military, 1 60-1 61.

— naval, 159-160.

zio

INDEX

Disease, epidemic, ii, 23, 25, 191.
Disraeli, 183,

Domestic life, 92-94, 179.

—help, 93-94. I79.

Dostoievsky, 185.

Dress, 95, 108-112.

Drunkenness, 102.

Economics and war, 27, 28,
162, 163.

Ectogenesis and eugenics, 14-16,
177, 178.

— and the foster mother, 176-179.
— and the status of woman in
society, 1G9-186.

-^economic effect of, 173-176.

— effect on marriage of, 15, 176.
— effect on society generally of,
IS. i6.

— opposition to, 14-16, 170-173,
193-

— versus natural birth, 170-173,
177, 178.

Education and genius, 166, 167.
— and the examination system, 90.
— for leisure, go, 91.

— general scientific, 80, 195.

— and University, 91, 180,
Einstein, 1, 79, 80, 181, 194,

Eliot, George, 184,

Energy, atomic, 4, 3, 29. I 23 -
— electrical, 7, 53, 63, 69, 70.

— electrical, broadcasting of,
128, 129.

— intra-molecular, 51, 54, 70,

125, 126, 193.

— present day sources of, 3,
37. 50-52. 122, 123,

— solar, 18.

— ^tidal, 6-7.

— wind, 6 .

Engineering and broadcasting of
talking films, 115.

— and molecular-energy motor,
125, 130. 131.

— and atomic-energy motor, 125.
Eros, and cost of aluminium, 65.
Eugenics, 13, 82-84.

— and ectogenesis, 14-16, 177, 178.

Europe and the “ Yellow Peril,”

148-153-

— and the negro peril, 156-159.

— before and after the European
War, 143, 148.

Factory, 49, 30.

— architecture of, 67-69.

— synthetic food, 56.

Farm, 49.

— ^versus food factory, 56.
Fashions in dress, 109-112.

Feudal system and Roman
Catholicism, 76, 77.

Fielding, 185.

Fleet, use of, in future warfare,
42, 43-

Foodstuffs, growth "in vitro,”
19. 20.

— synthetic, 18-20, 56,

Football, Cricket, Tennis, 106.
Ford, Mr. Henry, 71, 72.

— and building of airplanes, 125.
— and cleanliness, 103, 104.

Fox, Charles James, 106.

Fox hunting, 107.

France, and the Treaty of
Versailles, 143.

— ^the" pattern ” nation, 138-139.
Freud, ftofessor, 194.

Fuels {see Energy) .

Ganges Valley, the” future
OF, 53.

Garibaldi, 138.

Gases as weapons of warfare, 26.
" Genes,” 13.

Genius and education, 166-167.

— and heredity, 168.

— and the family, 168.

— comparison of male and female,
166-170.

— of the Anglo-Saxon races, 99.
Geography of the world ; future
changes in, 203, 206.

— and atomic-energy, 4.

George III, 148.

George, Lloyd, 202.

Germany, 142, 143, 148, 149.

— and the rocket car, 129-130.

211

INDEX

Greece, ancient, g, 183, 187, 188.

Haldane, Dr. J. B, S.. 10.

Henry V of England, 138,

Henry VH, 118.

Heredity, liuman, 13, 14, 82, 83,
— and genius, i68.

Hertzog, Genera), 145.

Himalayas and industry, 52, 53.
Hindus and Mohammedans in
India, 155.

Homer, 188, igS.

Horse and war, 39.

Horse racing, 106.

— and fox hunting, 107.

— and Hyde Park, 106.

Household arrangements, 93, 94.
— ^heating, 114.

India and Russia, 155.

— and the British Raj, 153-156.
Industrial prosperity in the
nineteenth century, 50, 51.

— science of the future, 73, 74.
Industry and Architecture, 67-69.
—and Britain, 49-52. 54 - 57 .

66-70.

— and cleanliness, 104.

— and Italy, 53, 34.

— and shortage of copper, 63.

— and the moulding of society, 117,
— and the Rhone valley, 53, 54.
— and war, 75, 163,

— and the motor car, 61, 62.

— decentralised, 65-67.

— future developments of, 16,
49 - 75 -

— centres of, 52-58, 60-61, 146.

— artificial silk, 59, 60,

— centralisation of the electrical,
69, 70.

— fine chemical, 55.

— the fundamental, 17, 56.

— the fundamental problems of,

67, 68.

— the present sources of energy
for. 3 , 37 , 50-52, 122, 123,

— synthetic rubber, 59.

Infantry, 30-35.

Infantry tactics in future warfare,
36, 39. 41-
Inge, Dean, 100.

Irak, and the British Air Force,
161.

Ironclads, 34.

Iron ore, shortage of good, 63, 64.
Italy and industry, 53, 54.

— and nationality, 140.

Japanese compared with
Chinese, 150,

Jeremiah, 100.

Joan of Arc, 13S, 167.

Johnson, Samuel, g6.

Kant, 167.

Kelvin, Lord, 167.

King George V, 144.

Lancashire and the artificial
SILK industry, 60,

League of Nations, prohibition
of the use of gases, 26, 27.

— ^work of, r62, 163.

Lister, 170.

Locomotive, 22,

— development of, 120, I2i.
Lodge, Sir Oliver, 13.

London and noise, 104, 105,

— and cleanliness, 103.

— ^and air journey to New York,
135-

Louis XIV, 138.

Louis XVI, 1 1 8.

Luther, Martin, 138.

Machine Gun, 25, 32, 33, 36, 41.
Mahommedans and Hindus in
India, 154.

— ^and polygamy, 165, 166.

— and the Negro Republic, 158.
Marlborough, 25, 40.

Marriage, 13,

■ — as a career for woman, 167, 168.
— efiect of ectogenesis on, 15.

— effect of education on, 92-95.

— effect of eugenics on, 82-84.

— monogamy and polygamy, 165,

212

INDEX

Mars, expedition to, 132-134
Mathematics and science. 80, 81,
84

Mechanical transport, 35-38
Mechanised force, British, 35,
38. 39 , 40

Mechanised warfare, future
development of, 40-45
Medicine, advances in, ii
— an exact science, 80
Merrimac and Monitor, naval
duel between. 34
Metals, shortage of, 62-65, 129
Milton, 80

Moon, expedition to the, 131, 132
Moses, 187

Motor, atomic-energy, 29, 125
— electric, 128, 129
— internal combustion, 2, 29, 37,
122-125, 129

— molecular energy, 125-131
Motor-car, decay of, 61, 62, 119
— and noise, 104, 105

Napier, Sir William, 46
Napoleon, 25, 30, 40, 47, 118,
140, 130, 167

Nationality and China, 153-156
— and Europe, 144
— and India, 153-156
— and Peace, 140, 141
— and President Wilson, 142
— and the negro, 156-159
— the idea of, 138, 139
Negro, the, and Africa, 156-159,
205

— and Christianity, 157-159
—and Europe, 156-159
— and Islam, 158
Nelson, 202
Newton, i, 3, 80, 194
Nightmgale, Florence, 167, 182
Noise, 104-105
North, Lord, 148
Nitrogen, fixing of, 17

Odysseus, 187.
Omdurman, 45.

Pasteur, 170
Petrol {see Energy)

Pharaoh, 187
Pheidias, 185
Physics, applied, 2—8
— ^rate of progress of, 22
— theoretical basis of, 2, 181, 194
Physiology, an exact science,
80, 181.

Pitt, William, 202
Plato, 77

Politics and scientific psychology,
86-89, 195, 196
— looking ahead, 205-207
Polygamy and Islam, 163, 166
Power, cheap, 3-6, 51, 66, 71, 72
— effects of, 7X-73
— electncal, 66, 69, 70
— problem of, 6, 51-55, 69-73
— stations, of the future, 53,
69-72

— steam, 51, 54
Prince of Wales, 112
Problems of future industry,
62-65

— of human relationships,
199-205

— of nationality, 138-144
— social, 5, II

Prophecy in Egypt, 1S7-191
Proteins, growth of, 19
— synthetic production of. 19
Psychology, present condition of,

85

— scientific, 84, 85
— and advertising, 199, 200
— and diplomacy and disarma-
ment, 203-205
— and education, 199
— and human relationships,
199-203

— and politics, 86-89, 195-197
— and law, 196
— and the arts, 197-199
— and the hves of professional
men, 200, 201

Queen Elizabeth, 182
— Victoria, 141.

213

INDEX

Railways, zz, 39 . 125.
Rejuvenation, 12,

Religion, 76, 77, 157-159-
KJione Valley and Industry,

S3. 54-
Ricardo, 82.

Rienzi, 167.

Rifle, 31, 32, 45-47. 17°-

Robot, ectogenetic, 16.

Rocket car, 129, 130.

Roman Catholicism and the
feudal system, 76, 77, I35.
138.

— Empire, 145, 146.

Rosebery, Lord, 106.

Rousseau, 172.

Rubber, synthetic, 59. .

Ruslcin, John, 96.

Russell of Killowen, Lord, 106.
Rutherford, Sir Ernest, 13-

Sahara, a playground for
Europe, 113, 114, 203.

St. Catlierino of Sienna, 167.

St. Peter, 189.

St. Thomas k Becket, 167.
Sappho, 167, 184,

Sarto, Andre del, 199.

Savonarola, 100.

Science and Mathematics, 80,
81, 84.

— and future of human life, 81-92,
96, 97- , o

Scientific theory, essence of, 04.
Seneca, loo,

Servants, 93, 179.

Shakespeare, 138, rpS.

Silk, artificial, 59, 60.

— basis of clothing, 108, 109-
Sld-ing, 1 13.

Smith, Adam. 8a.

Social problems, 5, ii.

Society, the agricultural basis of,
21.

Speed of airplanes, 5, 122, 127, 131.
Stage coach, 125.

Steam engine, 2, 51.

-—history of locomotive, zz.
Steam power and industry, 51, 54-

Steel manufacture, 52, 63, 64.
Sugar, 19.

Surgery, advances in, ii.
Synthetic foodstuffs, iS-20, 56.

— food industry and Britain,

57. 193-

— food industry and cellulose,

57. 58-

—rubber, 59-

Tacxics of warfare before
1914 , 30, 31.

— JOl^lS, 32, 33.

— ^future, 35-38, 41-45.

Tamerlane, 152.

Tank, a defensive weapon, 33.

— amphibious, 41-14.

— a primary offensive rveapon, 34.
— development of, 33, 36, 41-45.
— ^giant, 44.

— objections to use of, 39-
— versus machine-gun and bullet,
33-

Telegraphy, wireless, 44.
Telephone, 2, 135.

Telephony, -wireless, 8, 37.
Television, 8, 45, II4, 115.
Theatres, 108, 115, 116.
Thompson, Sir J. j., 13.

Tidal energy, 6, 7.

• — ^friction and rotation of earth, 7-
Tides, 6-8, 51, 54, 69, 193-
Tin, shortage of, 62.

Tobacco, physiological effects of,
10.

Tolstoy, 198.

Transport, mechanical. 35-44.

— aerial, 126-127.

Travel, 2, 5, 108, 112-114.

— week-end, 108, 112-114, 127,
iz8.

Treaty oi Versailles, 142, 143.

United States of America, 49,

52, 63-

— and Canada, 147.

— and China, 153.

— and Mexico, 147.

214

INDEX

United States ot America, contd.
— and social life in the Southern
States before the American
Civil War, Ii6,

— and the British Empire, 147,
148.

— and the cotton industry, 60.
— and the motor-car industry, 61.
Universe, human conceptions of,
78, 79-

Vanbrugh, 198,

Vergil, 188.

Verne, M. Jules, 189.

War, American Civil, 34, ii6.
—-and industry, 75, 163.

— between China and Europe,
150, 151,

— causes of, 203, 204.

— economics and, 27. 28.

— in the “ Air- Age," 133-137.

— of American Independence, 45,
46.

— of attrition, 32.

— of destruction, 29,

— of occupation, 29.

— on land, 29, 30.

— popular belief about future, 25.
— South African, 31.

— the European, 24, 141, 192.
Warfare, decisive factor in future,
29.

— mechanised, future development
of, 40-45.

Waterloo, 31, 47.

Wealth, in last 60 years of 20th
century, 193.

— in the 21st century, 206.

— allocations of, to cosmic

development, 207.

— and agriculture, 56.

— sources of, 2, 6, 16, 57, 71.

— destruction of, 19M--J92S, 192,

Wealth, contd.

— and education, gi, 180.

— and recreations, 105-108,

— and size of family, 179.

— Chinese, 151-153.

Wellington, 47.

Wells, Mr H. G., 189.

Weapons of war : airplanes ;

bombing, 37, 39.

— bayonet, 30.

— bullet, 30-33-
— gas, 26.

— machine-gun, 25-32, 33. 3d, 41.
— muskets, 31.

— the perfect, 41, 42.

—rifle, 31, 32, 45-47, 170.

— tank, 33-41.

Wesley, John, 98,

Wieat, 18.

Wilson, Sir Henry, 46.

Wilson, President Woodrow, 142.
Wind, energy, 6.

Winter sports, 113,

Wireless telegraphy, use of in
future warfare, 44,

— telephony, 8, 22, 37.

— ^television, 8, 45, 114, 115.
Woman, art and, 183-185.

— ectogenesis and, i6g--i79.

— essential differences between
man and, 183.

— executive posts and, 181-182,
— man and, 185, 186.

— marriage as a career for, 167,
168.

—motherhood and, 164-169.

— ^scientific research as a career
for, 180, 181,

— value to the state of, 164, 165,
180-186.

Working week : future, 71, 72.
Wright Brothers, 120,

Yellow Peril." The, 148-153,

215